ly, but in self defence.

"You did," she said, and her audacity took his breath away.

"Well, how am I to help you!" he asked after a while.

"By giving me some advice," she said; "do you think I ought to put the
money there!"

"Indeed I do not," said T. X., recovering some of his natural dominance;
"apart from the fact that you would be compounding a felony, you would
merely be laying out trouble for yourself in the future. If he can get
20 pounds so easily, he will come for 40 pounds. But why do you stay
away, why don't you return home? There's no charge and no breath of
suspicion against you."

"Because I have something to do which I have set my mind to," she said,
with determination in her tones.

"Surely you can trust me with your address," he urged her, "after all
that has passed between us, Belinda Mary--after all the years we have
known one another."

"I shall get out and leave you," she said steadily.

"But how the dickens am I going to help you?" he protested.

"Don't swear," she could be very severe indeed; "the only way you can
help me is by being kind and sympathetic."

"Would you like me to burst into tears?" he asked sarcastically.

"I ask you to do nothing more painful or repugnant to your natural
feelings than to be a gentleman," she said.

"Thank you very kindly," said T. X., and leant back in the cab with an
air of supreme resignation.

"I believe you're making faces in the dark," she accused him.

"God forbid that I should do anything so low," said he hastily; "what
made you think that?"

"Because I was putting my tongue out at you," she admitted, and the taxi
driver heard the shrieks of laughter in the cab behind him above the
wheezing of his asthmatic engine.

At twelve that night in a certain suburb of London an overcoated man
moved stealthily through a garden. He felt his way carefully along the
wall of the house and groped with hope, but with no great certainty,
along the window sill. He found an envelope which his fingers, somewhat
sensitive from long employment in nefarious uses, told him contained
nothing more substantial than a letter.

He went back through the garden and rejoined his companion, who was
waiting under an adjacent lamp-post.

"Did she drop?" asked the other eagerly.

"I don't know yet," growled the man from the garden.

He opened the envelope and read the few lines.

"She hasn't got the money," he said, "but she's going to get it. I must
meet her to-