e than August 27th."

Something leaped into his face. "27th--23rd? Then you're sure? You
know?"

She felt she scarce knew what--as if she might soon be pounced upon for
some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all
sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the
wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker's might be supposed to have
schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really quite
lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was
dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced. Scandal?--it
had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense surface, and
the surface was somehow Captain Everard's wonderful face. Deep down in
his eyes a picture, a scene--a great place like a chamber of justice,
where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but heroic, swore
with a quavering voice to a document, proved an _alibi_, supplied a link.
In this picture she bravely took her place. "It was the 23rd."

"Then can't you get it this morning--or some time to-day?"

She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned on
her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted. She
didn't care--not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper.
With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift--a morsel of
blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen. "Have you got a
card?" she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington now,
and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card out. She
gave no glance at the name on it--only turned it to the other side. She
continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never held him;
and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less marked. She
wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it across to him.

He fairly glared at it. "Seven, nine, four--"

"Nine, six, one"--she obligingly completed the number. "Is it right?"
she smiled.

He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke out
in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous exposure. He
shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sympathy,
the blinking young men. "By all the powers--it's _wrong_!" And without
another look, without a word of thanks, without time for anything or
anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature,
straightened his tr