you wanted to help to place out in the world----"

"Heaven forbid! It's no wonder you look worried. What do you want to do
for them, Miss Gray?"

"There's Jim. He's seventeen years old. I think he'd make a very good
bank-clerk, but at present he wants to go to sea. There isn't the
remotest chance of his being able to go to sea. The question is whether
he can get a nomination to a bank. It will be quite a step in the social
scale if we can manage it for Jim."

She looked at Drummond with her frank, direct gaze, and he blushed
awkwardly.

"I don't know anything at all about your people, or anything of that
sort, Miss Gray, but if I could help----"

"I don't think you could help." Mary's big mysterious eyes under their
dark lashes, under their beautiful brows, looked at him reflectively.
"You see, you don't know anything about us. I am the eldest of a large
family. The others are my stepbrothers and sisters. I love them dearly,
and I love my stepmother, too. But not like my father--oh, not at all
like my father. I would never have left him only he sent me away. Lady
Agatha was very good to me. She paid me a disproportionate salary. And
besides--after I had been away from them for a time they could really do
very well without me. Cis and Minnie grew up so fast. To be sure, none
of them make up to father for me. But he was really anxious that I
should go. He thought I would be cramped at home, after----" She paused,
and then went on: "He would never think of himself when it was a
question of me."

What she was saying did not greatly enlighten him. But, without a doubt,
something would come out of the desultory talk by-and-by.

As he watched her in the light of the electric candle-lamps on the
table, which, sending their shaded light upwards reflected from the
white cloth, made her face luminous in the shadow of her cloudy hair, he
was struck again by a baffling resemblance to someone he had known. Now
and again during the months since they had known each other her face had
seemed familiar; then the likeness had disappeared; he had forgotten to
be curious about it. At this moment the suggestion was very strong.

They had the top of the 'bus to themselves as they went on westward. At
this hour the traffic was eastward, and the mist of rain saved them from
fellow-travellers. They were as much alone as though they were in a
desert, up there in the darkness at the back of the bus, with the long
line of blurred jewels tha