and laughed.

"You are a plucky one, you." He patted her glove with his hand. "Yes,
you are a plucky one."

Hilda sighed. "No, I'm not. Not about some things, at any rate. It
doesn't take pluck to fight for one's moment, but it takes pluck to go
without--a lot. More than I have. I can't help it," she added fiercely.

After miles of outlying streets and little gloomy houses, they reached
London itself, red and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness coming
up from the river, that betokened fog again to-morrow. The streets were
full of people who had worked indoors all through the priceless day and
had now come hungrily out to drink the muddy lees of it. They stood
in long black lines, waiting before the pit entrances of the
theatres--short-coated boys, and girls in sailor hats, all shivering
and chatting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all the dull city
noises--in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of the busses,
in the street calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd. It
was like the deep vibration of some vast underground machinery, and like
the muffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.

[See "The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes. Ed.] [I have placed it at the
end for your convenience]

"Seems good to get back, doesn't it?" Bartley whispered, as they drove
from Bayswater Road into Oxford Street. "London always makes me want to
live more than any other city in the world. You remember our priestess
mummy over in the mummy-room, and how we used to long to go and bring
her out on nights like this? Three thousand years! Ugh!"

"All the same, I believe she used to feel it when we stood there and
watched her and wished her well. I believe she used to remember," Hilda
said thoughtfully.

"I hope so. Now let's go to some awfully jolly place for dinner before
we go home. I could eat all the dinners there are in London to-night.
Where shall I tell the driver? The Piccadilly Restaurant? The music's
good there."

"There are too many people there whom one knows. Why not that little
French place in Soho, where we went so often when you were here in
the summer? I love it, and I've never been there with any one but you.
Sometimes I go by myself, when I am particularly lonely."

"Very well, the sole's good there. How many street pianos there are
about to-night! The fine weather must have thawed them out. We've had
five miles of `Il Trovatore' now. They always make me feel jaunty. Are
you comfy