."

And at that the corners of her own mouth broke into a smile, and she
thought with a simultaneous pleasure of Gregory's absurdity and of his
safety.

Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and
continued to pour out his opinions. For he was a sincere man, and in
spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And
it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches
himself too closely. He defended respectability with violence and
exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and
propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all round him. Once
he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to
play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny
tune from under or beyond the world.

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what
seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a
place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered
the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself
with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his
head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which
were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again
until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she
kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures
afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread
through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what
followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.

When Syme went out into the starlit street, he found it for the moment
empty. Then he realised (in some odd way) that the silence was rather a
living silence than a dead one. Directly outside the door stood a street
lamp, whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the
fence behind him. About a foot from the lamp-post stood a figure almost
as rigid and motionless as the lamp-post itself. The tall hat and long
frock coat were black; the face, in an abrupt shadow, was almost as
dark. Only a fringe of fiery hair against the light, and also something
aggressive in the attitude, proclaimed that it was the poet Gregory. He
had something of the look of a masked bravo waiting sword in hand for
his foe.

He made a sort of doubtful salute, which Syme somewhat more formally
returned.

"I was waiting