ar-old
jacket and hat of curly Astrachan; both pink-cheeked from the keen
air, shyly arm in arm occasionally, and very alert to miss no possible
spectacle. The shops were varied and interesting along the Brompton
Road, but nothing to compare with Piccadilly. There were windows in
Piccadilly so full of costly little things, it took fifteen minutes to
get them done, card shops, drapers' shops full of foolish,
entertaining attractions. Lewisham, in spite of his old animosities,
forgot to be severe on the Shopping Class, Ethel was so vastly
entertained by all these pretty follies.

Then up Regent Street by the place where the sham diamonds are, and
the place where the girls display their long hair, and the place where
the little chickens run about in the window, and so into Oxford
Street, Holborn, Ludgate Hill, St. Paul's Churchyard, to Leadenhall,
and the markets where turkeys, geese, ducklings, and chickens--turkeys
predominant, however--hang in rows of a thousand at a time.

"I _must_ buy you something," said Lewisham, resuming a topic.

"No, no," said Ethel, with her eye down a vista of innumerable birds.

"But I _must_," said Lewisham. "You had better choose it, or I shall
get something wrong." His mind ran on brooches and clasps.

"You mustn't waste your money, and besides, I have that ring."

But Lewisham insisted.

"Then--if you must--I am starving. Buy me something to eat."

An immense and memorable joke. Lewisham plunged
recklessly--orientally--into an awe-inspiring place with mitred
napkins. They lunched on cutlets--stripped the cutlets to the
bone--and little crisp brown potatoes, and they drank between them a
whole half bottle of--some white wine or other, Lewisham selected in
an off-hand way from the list. Neither of them had ever taken wine at
a meal before. One-and-ninepence it cost him, Sir, and the name of it
was Capri! It was really very passable Capri--a manufactured product,
no doubt, but warming and aromatic. Ethel was aghast at his
magnificence and drank a glass and a half.

Then, very warm and comfortable, they went down by the Tower, and the
Tower Bridge with its crest of snow, huge pendant icicles, and the ice
blocks choked in its side arches, was seasonable seeing. And as they
had had enough of shops and crowds they set off resolutely along the
desolate Embankment homeward.

But indeed the Thames was a wonderful sight that year! ice-fringed
along either shore, and with drift-ice in the