aler's by the precious Harry, a rope, a
midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an English ship; the
anchor weighed; and the lovers were free on the bounding main. A
most refreshing story! I put on a sudden air of sternness, and shot a
question at her like a bullet.

"Are you making all this up, young woman?"

She started-looked quite scared.

"You mean I tell lies? But no. It is all true. Why shouldn't it be true?
How else could I have come here?"

The question was unanswerable. Her story was as preposterous as her
garments. But her garments were real enough. I looked long into her
great innocent eyes. Yes, she was telling me the truth. She babbled
on for a little. I gathered that her step-father, Hamdi Effendi, was a
Turkish official. She had spent all her life in the harem from which she
had eloped with this pretty young Englishman.

"And what must I do?" she reiterated.

I told her to give me time. One is not in the habit of meeting abducted
Lights of the Harem in the Embankment Gardens, beneath the National
Liberal Club. It was, in fact, a bewildering occurrence. I looked around
me. Nothing seemed to have happened during the last ten minutes. A pale
young man on the next bench, whom I had noticed when I entered, was
reading a dirty pink newspaper. Pigeons and sparrows hopped about
unconcernedly. On the file of cabs, just perceptible through the
foliage, the cabmen lolled in listless attitudes. Sir Bartle Frere
stolidly kept his back to me, not the least interested in this Gilbert
a Becket story. I always thought something was wrong with that man's
character.

What on earth could I tell her to do? The best course was to find the
infernal Harry. I asked her how she came to lose him. It appears he
escorted her ashore at Southampton, after having scarcely set eyes
on her during the voyage, put her into a railway carriage with strict
injunctions not to stir until he claimed her, and then disappeared into
space.

"Did he give you your ticket?"

"No."

"What a young blackguard!" I exclaimed.

"I don't like him at all," she said.

How she managed to elude the ticket collector at Vauxhall I could not
exactly discover. Apparently she told him, in her confiding manner, that
Harry had it, and when he found no Harry in the train and came back to
say so, she turned her dewy imploring eyes on him and the sentimental
varlet melted. At Waterloo a man had told her she must get out of the
carriage--she had travel