rable
thing he had become. "She doesn't want you, doesn't want you, doesn't
want you," their umbrellas and their elbows seemed to say.

He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his window: "At
any rate I won't turn back"--as though it might cause the sender a
malicious joy to have him retrace his steps rather than keep on to
Paris! Now he perceived the absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars
that he need not plunge, to no purpose, into the fury of waves outside
the harbour.

With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his porter;
but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas made signalling impossible and,
perceiving that he had lost sight of the man, he scrambled up again to
the platform. As he reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the
collar-bone; and the next moment, bent sideways by the wind, it turned
inside out and soared up, kite-wise, at the end of a helpless female
arm.

Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and looked up at
the face it exposed to him.

"Wait a minute," he said; "you can't stay here."

As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the umbrella
abruptly down on him. Darrow steadied her with extended arms, and
regaining her footing she cried out: "Oh, dear, oh, dear! It's in
ribbons!"

Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke in him
a memory of having seen it at a distant time and in a vaguely
unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to follow up such clues, and
the face was obviously one to make its way on its own merits.

Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at the tattered
umbrella. "I bought it only yesterday at the Stores; and--yes--it's
utterly done for!" she lamented.

Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress. It was food for the
moralist that, side by side with such catastrophes as his, human nature
was still agitating itself over its microscopic woes!

"Here's mine if you want it!" he shouted back at her through the
shouting of the gale.

The offer caused the young lady to look at him more intently. "Why,
it's Mr. Darrow!" she exclaimed; and then, all radiant recognition: "Oh,
thank you! We'll share it, if you will."

She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had they met? He
put aside the problem for subsequent solution, and drawing her into a
more sheltered corner, bade her wait till he could find his porter.

When, a few minutes later, he came back wi