r, does things right. It's when the
conventional man comes in and says, Let us consider, that we go wrong.
By Jingo, Al'mah was as near having her beauty spoiled as any woman
ever was; but she's only got a few nasty burns on the arm and has
singed her hair a little."

"You've seen her to-day, then?"

Stafford looked at him with some curiosity, for the event was one
likely to rouse a man's interest in a woman. Al'mah was unmarried, so
far as the world knew, and a man of Byng's kind, if not generally
inflammable, was very likely to be swept off his feet by some unusual
woman in some unusual circumstance. Stafford had never seen Rudyard
Byng talk to any woman but Jasmine for more than five minutes at a
time, though hundreds of eager and avaricious eyes had singled him out
for attention; and, as it seemed absurd that any one should build a
palace in Park Lane to live in by himself, the glances sent in his
direction from many quarters had not been without hopefulness. And
there need not have been, and there was not, any loss of dignity on the
part of match-making mothers in angling for him, for his family was
quite good enough; his origin was not obscure, and his upbringing was
adequate. His external ruggedness was partly natural; but it was also
got from the bitter rough life he had lived for so many years in South
Africa before he had fallen on his feet at Kimberley and Johannesburg.

As for "strange women," during the time that had passed since his
return to England there had never been any sign of loose living. So, to
Stafford's mind, Byng was the more likely to be swept away on a sudden
flood that would bear him out to the sea of matrimony. He had put his
question out of curiosity, and he had not to wait for a reply. It came
frankly and instantly:

"Why, I was at Al'mah's house in Bruton Street at eight o'clock this
morning--with the milkman and the newsboy; and you wouldn't believe it,
but I saw her, too. She'd been up since six o'clock, she said. Couldn't
sleep for excitement and pain, but looking like a pansy blossom all the
same, rigged out as pretty as could be in her boudoir, and a nurse
doing the needful. It's an odd dark kind of beauty she has, with those
full lips and the heavy eyebrows. Well, it was a bull in a china-shop,
as you might judge--and thank you kindly, Mr. Byng, with such a jolly
laugh, and ever and ever and ever so grateful and so
wonderfully--thoughtful, I think, was the word, as though one h