she interrupted.

"Cab, then. Well, it was late in the afternoon, and two drunken little
cads tried to speak to her. Naturally, as I was the nearest decent
person, I interfered and assisted Miss Briscoe into her cab. That I was
passing was a piece of good fortune for which I have always been
thankful."

"Lord Lumley does not add that his interference consisted in knocking
one man down and holding the other until he almost choked with one hand,
while he helped me into the cab with the other."

"I only shook him a little," he laughed, giving his mother his arm, for
the butler had announced dinner while they had been talking. "If I had
been he I would rather have had the shaking than the look Miss Briscoe
flashed at him."

"I detest being touched," she said coldly, "especially by a stranger."

"How did the affair end?" Lord St. Maurice asked, sipping his soup. "I
hope you got them locked up, Lumley."

"Why, the termination of the affair was the part on which I do really
congratulate myself," he answered. "A policeman came up at once, but
before I could give them in charge--in which case I should, of course,
have been called upon to prosecute and got generally mixed up in the
affair--one of the fellows began thumping the policeman; so of course he
collared them and marched them off. I slipped away, and I noticed the
next morning that they got pretty heavily fined for assaulting a
policeman in the execution of his duty."

"A satisfactory ending to a most unpleasant affair," Lord St. Maurice
remarked.

During dinner Lord Lumley devoted himself to their guest, but for a long
time the burden of the conversation lay altogether upon his shoulders.
It was not until he chanced to mention the National Gallery, in
connection with the season's exhibition of pictures, that Margharita
abandoned her monosyllabic answers and generally reserved demeanor. He
saw at once that he had struck the right note, and he followed it up
with tact. He was fresh from a tour among the galleries of southern
Europe and Holland, and he himself was no mean artist. But Margharita,
he soon found, knew nothing of recent art. She was hopelessly out of
date. She knew nothing of the modern cant, of the nineteenth century
philistinism, at which it was so much the fashion to scoff. She had not
caught the froth of the afternoon talk at fashionable studios, and,
having jumbled it together in the popular fashion, she was not prepared
to set forth her views on