e
had closed the door stood for a long time looking out at the little
garden with its one big tree.

"I wonder, I _wonder_," he mused. "I'd give a good deal to get at that
ayah--well! why not?--I could start for----" He looked round suddenly,
then laughed as he passed his hand over his eyes. "Funny! I thought
someone opened the door."

He moved to his desk and turned over his diary, showing blank page
after blank page.

"Strange," he muttered. "There is nothing written down after to-day,
not a single engagement. I must have entered them in some other book;
very careless of me."

CHAPTER VI

"And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry
in their desolate homes."--_The Bible_.

"Gawd!"

Mrs. Henry Higgins called upon the Almighty in the vernacular of Seven
Dials, sought gropingly for the members of her progeny who clutched her
skirt, and fortunately kept her head.

"'Enery James--no! Gertrude Ellen--you've gotter better headpiece,
jest yer slip along to the keeper an' tell _'im_ to look slippy and
come along quick _h'and_ quiet!"

Gertrude Ellen, puffed up with pride at the pull she had had over her
brother, slipped off, as her mother continued in a raucous whisper,
"Now if that young miss don't deserve a thorough good 'iding! I'd take
the skin off yer if any of yer did such a fing, strite I would. Drat
yer, keep stilt cawn't yer--you'll rouse the brute!"

She shook her skirts so that the half-dozen clinging children rattled
like a bunch of keys, pushed her jet bonnet back from the shiny
wrinkled forehead, and waited, her motherly heart aquake in spite of
her drastic language.

Jan Cuxson was standing in front of the lions' cage at one end of the
lion-house, talking to his old friend the keeper, under the impression
that Leonie was close beside him; but she, having taken advantage of
their conversation and a practically empty house, had slipped quietly
away, climbed the barrier near the far window, and was _also_ holding
conversation--with a tiger from Bengal.

The animal lay outstretched with his wonderful head close to the bars,
and his unblinking opalescent gold-flecked eyes staring straight into
the opalescent gold-flecked eyes of the child as she stood on tip-toe
so that her face was almost on a level with that of the animal.

"_Poor_ tiger!" she was saying. "I'm vewwy sowwy for you--I'm sure
you're not so vewy, vewy wicked, an' if you will bend your head I will
stwoke you beh