he girl, but to the girl's fate. He was
the same man who had plunged after the submerged Morrison whom he
hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the usual gossip of the
islands. But this was another sort of plunge altogether, and likely to
lead to a very different kind of partnership.

Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective. But
if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence
that he paused at any time between the date of that evening and the
morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men
who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are
terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them. They lower their
heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity which nothing but an
indisciplined imagination can give.

He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where this
was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations
of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust
that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.

On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small
theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the
landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her
abandoned childhood. It was never positive starvation and absolute rags,
but it was the hopeless grip of poverty all the time. It was her father
who taught her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk
sometimes, but without pleasure, and only because he was unable to
forget his fugitive wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling
over with a crash in the well of a music-hall orchestra during the
performance, she had joined the Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home
for incurables.

"And I am here," she finished, "with no one to care if I make a hole in
the water the next chance I get or not."

Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than that,
if it was only a question of getting out of