nt by. Cabs rattled up and private carriages;
officers in glittering uniforms, ladies muffled in silk and swansdown
stepped past the policeman behind whom Gilbart hesitated. This would
never do; better he had gone in with the story hot on his lips.
He twitched the policeman's elbow.

"May I pass, please? I want to see the Admiral."

"That's likely, ain't it?"

"But I have a message for him; an urgent one--one that won't keep a
moment!"

"Why, I have seen you hanging round here this quarter hour with these
very eyes! 'Won't keep'? Here, you get out!"

"I tell you--"

"Oh, deliver us!" the policeman interrupted. "What's the matter with
you? Come to keep the Admiral's dinner cold while you hand over command
of the Channel Fleet?" He winked heavily at one or two of the nearest
in the crowd, and they laughed.

Gilbart eyed them savagely. He had a word in his mouth which would stop
their laughing; and for one irrational moment he was near speaking it,
near launching against half a dozen loafers the bolt which only to hold
and handle had aged him ten years in an hour. The word was even on his
tongue when a carriage passed and at its open window a young girl leaned
forward and looked out on the crowd. Her face in the light of the
entrance-lamp was exquisitely fair, delicately rose and white as the
curved inner lip of a sea-shell. At her throat, where her cloak-collar
fell back a little, showing its quilted lining of pale blue satin, a
diamond necklace shimmered, and a rosebud of diamonds in her hair
sparkled so that it seemed to dance. It caught Gilbart's eye, and
somehow it seemed to lift and remove her and the house she was
entering--the lit windows, the guests, the Admiral himself--into another
world. If it were real, then (like enough) this fragile thing, this
Dresden goddess, owned a brother, perhaps a lover, on board the
_Berenice_. If so, here was another world waiting to be shattered--a
world of silks and toys and pretty uniforms and tiny bric-a-brac--a sort
of doll's house inhabited by angels at play. But could it be real?
Could such a world exist and be liable as his own to _It_? Could the
same brutal touch destroy this fabric and the sordid privacies of
Prospect Place--all in a run like a row of card-houses?

"Never you mind _'im_, Mister Gilbart," said a voice at his elbow, and
he turned and looked in the face of a girl who, in an interval of
dressmaking, had once helped him with his distri