ate and he never suspected that May had spent the
afternoon in a distressing state of anxiety lest he should change his
mind, and, instead of going to the hotel, come straight down in time for
dinner.

"There is no telling what he may be like," she said to her
sister-in-law, who was staying in the house. "We must see him first
before we introduce him to people here. Why, he may not even possess a
dress suit."

Jimmy dined in the hotel. The dining-room was very empty, and he had a
corner of it all to himself, a miserable contrast to the cheerful,
crowded saloon of the mail steamer he had quitted that morning. He ate
very little, and would not wait for coffee. He felt he must get outside
that gloomy barn of the hostelry, must go where there was life and
movement, and, and if he could find it, society.

The rain had ceased, and, as he came out of the dull side street into
the Strand, he experienced for the first time that strange thrill,
excitement, anticipation, almost exhilaration, which only the returned
wanderer who comes back to the Greatest of Cities after years of
absence, can know. When he had driven up to the hotel, the day
population had been hurrying home through the downpour; now, though the
street and the pavements were still glistening with the wet, and there
was another deluge to come, London, the night side of London, was out as
if there was no such things as rain and mud and sodden footwear.

Jimmy stood a couple of minutes, watching it, taking it all in, as
though he had never seen it before. A policeman on point duty eyed him
curiously, yet with no hint of suspicion. Most men, and practically
every woman, remembered Jimmy's face when they met him a second time. He
was not handsome, far from it; but, in some indefinable way, his grey
eyes suggested sympathy, whilst the poise of his head spoke of
determination verging on obstinacy.

He was looking at the scene as a whole, rather than at individuals, and
the policeman remarked, with a kind of grim satisfaction, that he let
the women pass him unnoticed. Even when one turned back at the next
corner and repassed him slowly, he seemed not to see her. Just as he was
turning away, however, a girl's face did catch his eye, and,
unconsciously, he stopped again. She was coming out of a restaurant a
few yards away, accompanied by a man in evening dress, though she
herself was in an ordinary walking costume. Tall and very graceful, with
dark eyes and a perfect p