all the way. Mary and Cissy had been round together, in their
single superb person, to see him--he must live round the corner; they had
found that, in consequence of something they had come, precisely, to make
up for or to have another scene about, he had gone off--gone off just on
purpose to make them feel it; on which they had come together to Cocker's
as to the nearest place; where they had put in the three forms partly in
order not to put in the one alone. The two others in a manner, covered
it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes, she went all the way, and this
was a specimen of how she often went. She would know the hand again any
time. It was as handsome and as everything else as the woman herself.
The woman herself had, on learning his flight, pushed past Everard's
servant and into his room; she had written her missive at his table and
with his pen. All this, every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew
through and left behind her, the influence that, as I have said,
lingered. And among the things the girl was sure of, happily, was that
she should see her again.

CHAPTER IV

She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone,
and that was exactly a part of the luck of it. Not unaware--as how could
her observation have left her so?--of the possibilities through which it
could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen
conflicting theories about Everard's type; as to which, the instant they
came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that seemed
somehow addressed straight to her heart. That organ literally beat
faster at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with Cissy, and
who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the happiest of the
happy circumstances with which her mind had invested the friend of Fritz
and Gussy. He was a very happy circumstance indeed as, with his
cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught by his
companion, he put down the half-dozen telegrams it would take them
together several minutes to dispatch. And here it occurred, oddly
enough, that if, shortly before the girl's interest in his companion had
sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her immediate
vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his seventy words, of
preventing intelligibility. His words were mere numbers, they told her
nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of no name,