ot and thrived--the daily interviews at the area door
and these fortnightly strolls--seemed, on the face of it, inadequate.
Perhaps he owed his queer gift of constancy to the mysterious past that
gave him his baptismal name. They were both unusual.

A certain Sunday afternoon in early autumn found them sitting side by
side on a seat in a grubby London square. Janie, gripping the handle of
cook's borrowed umbrella, which she held perpendicularly before her, the
toes of her large boots turned a little inwards, was sucking a peppermint
bull's-eye.

To Nosey the hour and the place seemed propitious, and he proposed heroic
marriage.

"Lor!" gasped Janie, staring before her at the autumn tints that were
powdering the dingy elms with gold-dust. There was mingled pride and
perplexity in her tones; slowly she savoured the romantic moment to the
full, turning it over in her mind as the bull's-eye revolved in her
cheek, before finally putting it from her. Then:

"I couldn't marry you," she said gently. "You ain't got no prospecks."
Walking out with twelve bob a week was one thing; marriage quite a
different matter.

In the Orphanage where she had been reared from infancy the far-seeing
Sisters had, perhaps, not been unmindful of the possibility of this
moment. A single life of drudgery and hardship, even as a boarding-house
slavey, meant, if nothing more, meals and a roof over her head.
Improvident marriage demanded, sooner or later, starvation. This one
star remained to guide her when all else of the good Sisters' teaching
grew dim in her memory.

Prospecks--marry without and you were done. So ran Janie's philosophy.
The remains of the bull's-eye faded into dissolution.

Nosey was aghast. The perfidy of women! "You led me on!" he cried.
"You bin carry in' on wiv me. . . . 'Ow could you? Pictur' palaces an'
fried fish suppers an' all." He referred to the sweets of their
courtship. "'Ow, Janie!"

Janie wept.

After that the daily meetings at the area door were not to be thought of.
Nosey flung himself off in a rage, and for two successive nights
contemplated suicide from the parapet of Westminster Bridge. The irksome
round of duties on the ramshackle bicycle became impossible. The very
traffic murmured the name of Janie in his ears. London stifled him; he
wanted to get away and bury himself and his grief in new surroundings.
Then his eye was caught by one of the Admiralty recruiting posters in the
windo