as stamped
with all the worst passions of mankind.

Had the innocent girl but known it, the face was that of Lord Wynchgate,
one of the most contemptible of the greater nobility of Britain, and the
figure was his too.

"Ha!" exclaimed the dissolute Aristocrat, "whom have we here? Stay,
pretty one, and let me see the fair countenance that I divine behind
your veil."

"Sir," said Winnifred, drawing herself up proudly, "let me pass, I
pray."

"Not so," cried Wynchgate, reaching out and seizing his intended victim
by the wrist, "not till I have at least seen the colour of those eyes
and imprinted a kiss upon those fair lips."

With a brutal laugh, he drew the struggling girl towards him.

In another moment the aristocratic villain would have succeeded in
lifting the veil of the unhappy girl, when suddenly a ringing voice
cried, "Hold! stop! desist! begone! lay to! cut it out!"

With these words a tall, athletic young man, attracted doubtless by the
girl's cries, leapt into the corridor from the street without. His
figure was that, more or less, of a Greek god, while his face, although
at the moment inflamed with anger, was of an entirely moral and
permissible configuration.

"Save me! save me!" cried Winnifred.

"I will," cried the Stranger, rushing towards Lord Wynchgate with
uplifted cane.

But the cowardly Aristocrat did not await the onslaught of the unknown.

"You shall yet be mine!" he hissed in Winnifred's ear, and, releasing
his grasp, he rushed with a bound past the rescuer into the street.

"Oh, sir," said Winnifred, clasping her hands and falling on her knees
in gratitude. "I am only a poor inadequate girl, but if the prayers of
one who can offer naught but her prayers to her benefactor can avail to
the advantage of one who appears to have every conceivable advantage
already, let him know that they are his."

"Nay," said the stranger, as he aided the blushing girl to rise, "kneel
not to me, I beseech. If I have done aught to deserve the gratitude of
one who, whoever she is, will remain for ever present as a bright memory
in the breast of one in whose breast such memories are all too few, he
is all too richly repaid. If she does that, he is blessed indeed."

"She does. He is!" cried Winnifred, deeply moved. "Here on her knees she
blesses him. And now," she added, "we must part. Seek not to follow me.
One who has aided a poor girl in the hour of need will respect her wish
when she tells him that,