er all, there wasn't something in it.

"You're--you're not offended?" Her voice implored now and pleaded.

"That's all right."

"Well--if you're sure you're not--would you mind seeing me home?"

"Certainly. With pleasure."

* * * * *

She was all helpless again and childlike, and he liked her that way
best.

"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm afraid of them. I mean
I'm afraid of the people in them. They stare at me something awful. So
horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"

"Rude?" said Ransome. "It's disgustin'."

"As if there was something peculiar about me. Do _you_ see anything
peculiar about me? Anything, I mean, to make them stare?"

He was silent.

"_Do_ you?" she insisted, poignantly.

They were advancing headlong toward intimacy and its embarrassments.

"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me--no, I don't. Except that, don't you
know, you're--"

"I'm what?"

"Well--"

"Oh!" (She became more poignant than ever.) "You _do_, then--"

"No, I don't--on my honor I--I only meant that--well, you _are_ a bit
out of the way, you know."

Her large gaze interrogated him.

"Out of the way all round, I should fancy. Something rather wonderful."

"Something--rather--wonderful--" she repeated, drowsily.

"Strikes me so--that's all."

"Strange?"

"Sort of--"

"It _is_ strange that we should be talking this way--when you think--
Why, you don't even know my name."

"No more I do," said Ransome.

"My name is Violet. Violet Usher. Do you like it?"

"Very much," said Ransome.

He did not know if this was "cock-a-tree"; but if it was he found
himself enjoying it.

"And yours is Randall. Mr. Randall Ransome, aren't you?"

"I say, you know; how did you get hold of that?"

"Why--Winny told me."

In the strangeness of it all he had forgotten Winny.

"Then she told you wrong. Now I think of it, Winny doesn't know my real
name. My real name would take your breath away."

"Tell it me."

"Well--if you will have it--stand well back and hold your hat on. Don't
let it catch you full in the face. John--Randall--Fulleymore--Ransome.
Now you know me."

She smiled enchantingly. "Not quite. But I know something about you
Winny doesn't know. That's strange, isn't it?"

It was, if you came to think of it.

They had crossed the Euston Road now, and Miss Usher turned presently up
another side street going north. She stopped at a door in a long row of
dingy houses.