is true; but good, brave blood isn't much to fall back upon if you
happen to be a girl without escort, carrying a hand-bag containing
twenty-odd pounds in money, several bits of valuable jewellery--your
whole earthly possessions, in fact--and have lost your way on Hampstead
Heath at half-past eight o'clock at night, with a spring fog shutting
you in like a wall and shutting out everything else but a "mackerel"
collection of clouds that looked like grey smudges on the greasy-silver
of a twilit sky.

She looked round, but she could see nothing and nobody. The Heath was a
white waste that might have been part of the scenery in Lapland for all
there was to tell that it lay within reach of the heart and pulse of the
sluggish leviathan London. Over it the vapours of night crowded, an
almost palpable wall of thick, wet mist, stirred now and again by some
atmospheric movement which could scarcely be called a wind, although, at
times, it drew long, lacey filaments above the level of the denser mass
of fog and melted away with them into the calm, still upper air.

Miss Lorne hesitated between two very natural impulses--to gather up her
skirts and run, or to stand her ground and demand an explanation from
the person who was undoubtedly following her. She chose the latter.

"Who is there? Why are you following me? What do you want?" she flung
out, keeping her voice as steady as the hard, sharp hammering of her
heart would permit.

The question was answered at once--rather startlingly, since the
footsteps which caused her alarm, had all the while proceeded from
behind, and slightly to the left of her. Now there came a hurried rush
and scramble on the right; there was the sound of a match being
scratched, a blob of light in the grey of the mist, and she saw standing
in front of her, a ragged, weedy, red-headed youth, with the blazing
match in his scooped hands.

He was thin to the point of ghastliness. Hunger was in his pinched face,
his high cheekbones, his gouged jaws; staring like a starved wolf,
through the unnatural brightness of his pale eyes, from every gaunt
feature of him.

"'Ullo!" he said with a strong Cockney accent, as he came up out of the
fog, and the flare of the match gave him a full view of her, standing
there with her lips shut hard, and, the hand-bag clutched up close to her
with both hands. "You wot called, was it? Wot price me for arnswerin' of
you, eh?"

"Yes, it was I that called," she replied, making