ulty.

It was written in a studiously uneducated hand.

"Dear Miss,

"I know who you are. You are wanted by the police but I
will not give you away. Dear Miss. I am very hard up and
20 pounds will be very useful to me and I shall not trouble
you again. Dear Miss. Put the money on the window sill of
your room. I know you sleep on the ground floor and I will
come in and take it. And if not--well, I don't want to make
any trouble.

"Yours truly,

"A FRIEND."

"When did you get this?" he asked.

"This morning," she replied. "I sent the Agony to the paper by telegram,
I knew you would come."

"Oh, you did, did you?" he said.

Her assurance was very pleasing to him. The faith that her words implied
gave him an odd little feeling of comfort and happiness.

"I can easily get you out of this," he added; "give me your address and
when the gentleman comes--"

"That is impossible," she replied hurriedly. "Please don't think I'm
ungrateful, and don't think I'm being silly--you do think I'm being
silly, don't you!"

"I have never harboured such an unworthy thought," he said virtuously.

"Yes, you have," she persisted, "but really I can't tell you where I am
living. I have a very special reason for not doing so. It's not myself
that I'm thinking about, but there's a life involved."

This was a somewhat dramatic statement to make and she felt she had gone
too far.

"Perhaps I don't mean that," she said, "but there is some one I care
for--" she dropped her voice.

"Oh," said T. X. blankly.

He came down from his rosy heights into the shadow and darkness of a
sunless valley.

"Some one you care for," he repeated after a while.

"Yes."

There was another long silence, then,

"Oh, indeed," said T. X.

Again the unbroken interval of quiet and after a while she said in a low
voice, "Not that way."

"Not what way!" asked T. X. huskily, his spirits doing a little
mountaineering.

"The way you mean," she said.

"Oh," said T. X.

He was back again amidst the rosy snows of dawn, was in fact climbing
a dizzy escalier on the topmost height of hope's Mont Blanc when she
pulled the ladder from under him.

"I shall, of course, never marry," she said with a certain prim
decision.

T. X. fell with a dull sickening thud, discovering that his rosy snows
were not unlike cold, hard ice in their lack of resilience.

"Who said you would?" he asked somewhat feeb