nd tragedies. Little Lois Boriskoff, he thought, must know
more of human nature than any woman in those assemblies where, as the
half-penny papers told him, cards and horses and motor-cars were the
subjects chiefly talked about. It delighted him to imagine the abduction
of one of these society beauties and her forcible detention for a month
in Thrawl Street. How she would shudder and fear it all--and yet what
human lessons might not she carry back with her. Let them show him a
woman who could face such an ordeal unflinchingly and he would fall in
love with her himself. The impertinence of his idea never once dawned
upon him. He knew that his father's people had been formerly well-to-do
and that his mother had often talked of birth and family. "I may be
better than some of them after all," he reflected; and this was his
armor against humiliation. What did money matter? The fine idealist of
twenty, with a few coppers in his pocket, declared stoically that money
was really of no consequence at all.

He lingered some five minutes outside the great house in St. James'
Square, watching the couples in the rooms above, and particularly
interested in one face which appeared in, and disappeared from, a
brilliantly lighted alcove twice while he was standing there. A certain
grace of girlhood attended this apparition; the dress was rich and
costly and exquisitely made; but that which held Alban's closer
attention was the fact that the wearer of it unquestionably was a Pole,
and not unlike little Lois Boriskoff herself. He would not say, indeed,
that the resemblance was striking--it might have been merely that of
nationality. When the girl appeared for the second time, he admitted
that the comparison was rather wild. None the less, he liked to think
that she resembled Lois and might also have heard the news from Warsaw
to-day. Evidently she was the daughter of some rich foreigner in London,
for she talked and moved with Continental animation and grace. The type
of face had always made a sure appeal to Alban. He liked those broad
contrasts of color; the clear, almost white, skin; the bright red lips;
the open expressive eyes fringed by deep and eloquent lashes. This
unknown was taller than little Lois certainly--she had a maturer figure
and altogether a better carriage; but the characteristics of her
nationality were as sure--and the boy fell to wondering whether she was
also capable of that winsome sentiment and jealous frenzy which