tenant
of a Surrey villa. Before her full, inquiring eyes and calm salute he
found himself at once abashed and confused. He raised his hand to his
head, only to find that he had come out without a hat, and he certainly
appeared, as he stood there, to his worst possible advantage.

"Good morning, miss," he stammered; "I'm afraid I startled you!"

She winced a little at his address, but otherwise her manner was not
ungracious.

"You did a little," she admitted. "Do you usually stride out of your
windows like that, bareheaded and muttering to yourself?"

"I was in a beastly temper," he admitted. "If I had known who was
outside--it would have been different."

She looked into his face with some interest. "What an odd thing!" she
remarked. "Why, I should have thought that to-day you would have been
amiability itself. I read at breakfast-time that you had accomplished
something more than ordinarily wonderful in the City and had made--I
forget how many hundreds of thousands of pounds. When I showed the
sketch of your house to my chief, and told him that you were going to
let me interview you to-day, I really thought that he would have raised
my salary at once."

"It's more luck than anything," he said. "I've stood next door to ruin
twice. I may again, although I'm a millionaire to-day."

She looked at him curiously--at his ugly tweed suit, his yellow boots,
and up into the strong, forceful face with eyes set in deep hollows
under his protruding brows, at the heavy jaws giving a certain
coarseness to his expression, which his mouth and forehead, well-shaped
though they were, could not altogether dispel. And at he same time
he looked at her, slim, tall, and elegant, daintily clothed from her
shapely shoes to her sailor hat, her brown hair, parted in the middle,
escaping a little from its confinement to ripple about her forehead, and
show more clearly the delicacy of her complexion. Trent was an ignorant
man on many subjects, on others his taste seemed almost intuitively
correct. He knew that this girl belonged to a class from which his
descent and education had left him far apart, a class of which he knew
nothing, and with whom he could claim no kinship. She too was realising
it--her interest in him was, however, none the less deep. He was a
type of those powers which to-day hold the world in their hands, make
kingdoms tremble, and change the fate of nations. Perhaps he was all
the more interesting to her because, by all