her spirits. After a time she
had become acquainted with the prints that hung in the print-seller's
windows in Garrick Street; they always stayed there long enough to
grow familiar. There was also a jeweller's shop in Coventry Street;
it sold second-hand silver--old Sheffield-plated candle-sticks,
cream ewers and sugar bowls; George III. silver tea-services, and
quaint-shaped wine strainers--they stood there in the window in
profusion. In themselves, for the daintiness of their design, or the
value of their antiquity, they did not interest her. She liked the
look of them glittering there; they conveyed a sense of the
embarrassment of riches which touched her ideas of romance. It was
the tray of old-fashioned ornaments, brooches in the design of flimsy
baskets of flowers, each flower represented by a different coloured
stone--old signet rings, old seals, quaint little figures of men and
beasts in silver, sometimes in gold; these were the things that
caught her fancy; she pored over them, choosing, every time she
passed, some fresh trinket that she would like to possess.

But on this evening in November she did not stop. At the
print-seller's in Garrick Street, she hesitated, but one glance over
her shoulder sped her onwards. The apprehension most prominent in
her mind was that if she continually looked behind her, the man might
fancy she was encouraging him. Once having consciously decided that,
she turned no more until she had reached the protection of the
fountain in the middle of the Circus. There she stopped and glanced
back. He was gone. In all the hundreds of human beings who mingled
and churned like a swarm of ants upon an ant-hill, he was nowhere
to be seen. With a genuine sigh of relief, she crossed over to the
Piccadilly side and walked beside a Hammersmith 'bus, as if slowed
gradually down to the regulated place where the conditions of traffic
permit vehicles to collect their passengers.

A little crowd of people, like flies upon fallen fruit, clung about
the steps of the 'bus as it moved towards its resting-place. She
joined in with them, jostled along the pavement by their efforts to
secure an advantageous position by the steps. When finally it did
come to a standstill and she had reached the conductor's platform,
the announcement, "Outside only," met her attempt to force a passage
within.

It was still raining--persistent mist of rain that steals a way
through any clothing. Should she wait? She had no