in the door.
I felt the need of solitude.

* * * * *

Later in the evening I became mundane again. I remembered that I had
sent dinner away, and though I had only to ring the bell and order
something, I felt the need of fresh air. So I took up my hat and stick
and left the house.

After a while I found my way into Piccadilly. I knew very little of
London, but after my solitary evening walks at Braster along the
sandhills and across the marshes, the contrast was in itself suggestive
and almost exciting. I watched the people, the stream of carriages. I
listened to the low ceaseless hum of this wonderful life, and I found it
fascinating. The glow in the sky was marvellous to me--the faces of the
passers-by, the laughter and the whining, the tears and the cursing, the
pleasure-seekers and the pleasure-satiated, how they all told their
story as they swept by in one unceasing stream! For a while I forgot
even my appetite. The sight of a restaurant, however, at last reminded
me that I was desperately hungry.

I knew it by name--a huge cosmopolitan place of the lower middle class,
and entering I found a quiet seat, where my country clothes were not
conspicuous. There were few people about me, and those few
uninteresting, so I kept my attention divided between my dinner and the
evening paper. But just as I was drawing towards the close of my meal,
something happened to change all that.

A woman, followed by a man, passed my table, and the two seated
themselves diagonally opposite to me. Something in the woman's light
footsteps, her free movements, and the graceful carriage of her head,
struck me instantly as being familiar. She was dressed very plainly,
and she was closely veiled. Their entrance, too, had been unobtrusive,
almost furtive. But when she raised her veil and took the
_carte-du-jour_ in her hand, I knew her at once. It was Mrs.
Smith-Lessing.

She had not seen me, and my first impulse was to pay my bill and step
quietly out. Then by chance I glanced at her companion, and my heart
stood still. He was a tall man, over six feet, but he stooped badly,
and his walk had been almost the walk of an invalid. He had the
appearance of a man who had once been stout and well built, but who was
now barely recovered from a long illness. The flesh hung in little bags
underneath his bloodshot eyes, his mouth twitched continually, and the
hand which rested on the table trembled. He wore a scanty