individual with the expensive, well-groomed air we associate with
art-dealers. Fine eyes. I put down the picture and sipped my tea. This
was all very well, but she had not asked me to come and see her simply
to show off, surely.

"'And you've called me all the way from Glasgow to see some pretty
clothes?' I asked. She looked hard at me for a moment and then dropped
her eyes and smiled. She spoke, and in her voice there was the peculiar
bell-like resonance I remarked the first time I heard her pronounce her
name.

"'No, Mr. Chief,' she said, 'I have a favour to ask. A great favour.
Will you do something for me? You did like me a little, you know.'

"'Oh, are you sure of that?' I enquired, coldly, and she nodded with a
sudden rapturous vivacity. I dare say she was. Very little of that
nature escapes a woman who exists chiefly by her temperament. I had
been sentimental on the cliff and begged her to use me. Well, I was
still young enough to feel a thrill because a pretty woman appealed to
me, because I had been singled out for that delicate honour. I did what
any of you would have done. I consented. And then she told me hurriedly
what she wanted me to do. I was ... yes, this was the man. I understood,
eh? She had written him from Saloniki. No answer. He did not know she
was in London. She could not go, did not want to go for that matter. It
was all over for ever. But it was his child. If I went to him, told him
I had come from out there and had seen her ... eh? She wanted him to
take the child, later, and bring him up. As an Englishman. And I was to
come back and tell her what he said.

"And there I was, a respectable, sea-faring person, flying through
London in a taxi-cab on a wild-goose chase at the behest of a girl who
was rapturously sure I had liked her a little! It was an adventure which
disproves the old proverb again. I found myself being carried northward,
along streets of an intolerable meanness, past huge vulgar stores, among
clanging street-cars and plunging motor-buses. I looked at the
address--'Mr. Florian Kelly, 6 Kentish Studios, Kentish Town N. E.' This
was Kentish Town. We swung round a corner by a huge terra-cotta subway
station, shot up a drab street, turned into a narrow lane, and stopped
opposite a tall green wooden wall. I got out, rather dazed, and telling
the man to wait, looked about for an entrance. There was a door in the
wall with the words 'Kentish Studios' over a bell handle. But the bell