. .”

“Who is she, I wonder? Where does she come from?” said someone else, not for the first time.

“Irish, if you ask me,” said a Teague who was present. “She’s Irish; Irish with a touch of dusky Southern blood — the passion and magnetism of old Spain.”

“Not a bit of it,” said a Fabian. “Those eyes are Oriental eyes, bright with the pain of young life born amid fated glories, like a palm tree springing up through the floor of a crumbling palace. They have the meekness too, of Oriental eyes, the eyes of a slave set free from the tyranny of an old exhausting beauty, meekly awaiting the commands of that inexplicable liberator, Western Civilization.”

“She walks, it is true, like one accustomed to the courts of India, rather than to those of Wimbledon,” said a belated essayist on the Woman Question.

“My ideal!” exclaimed an earnest-looking man, who had never uttered a word before, and he nodded with emphatic approval at the last speaker, before he sank, blushing like the setting sun, behind the wide horizon of his teacup.

“Well, I like her,” said a simple fellow, “because she’s a little woman. A bouncing little woman. I like them like that. My first wife was a bouncing little woman. My second wife was not. I was deliriously happy with my first wife. With my second — not altogether so. I like a bouncing little woman.”

“Well, gentlemen,” said the senior member of the company, who ignored the last remark as being the probably carnal utterance of one whose work was merely the compiling of a cyclists’ encyclopedia, “well, gentlemen, we had better make a move if we’re to catch a last glimpse of her, for like all that’s best in life, she comes late and departs early, heaven knows where.”

And, rising fragrant-breathed from their tables, the lowing herd wound slowly from the tearoom, and lumbered in clumsy haste, goaded by a small and naked child, to their places in the Augean barton within. But, of the nine, only eight were thus urged home, for one, prodded too painfully perhaps, had jibbed at the gate, and now lurked, restless with uneasy purpose, in the entrance hall.

This was the earnest man who had spoken but two fervent words in the course of this, and all foregoing conversations, and from whom even those two could only have been elicited by the extreme force of his approval of the hint that Emily was an old-fashioned woman, much like his mother, of whom his memories were scented as with lavender, and like a dearly beloved aunt, on whom he had had a boyish fixation of the libido. Like most of the silent kind, he was a man of action. Careless of consequences, he had left his attaché case and his MS derelict upon his desk.

“What,” he thought, “is mere property, and the fruits of dry pedantic labor, compared with newborn romance?” “Nothing,” he decided, “but the material for a fantastic sacrifice, like that of the beggar who, having come by a ticket in the Calcutta Sweep, flings his last penny into the river or upon the bar, in order to wait, in shiveringly expectant nakedness, for the advent of the capricious goddess.”

“She is coming, my own, my sweet,” he murmured, as the door swung glassily at the end of the corridor. “And now to follow her home, and find out where she lives!”

Fate, whose initial gifts to lovers are supplied as generously as those free meals an angler offers to the fish, decreed that he should not be disappointed, for in a few seconds the outer door opened, and, surely enough, it was Emily came through, her rapt eye and parted lips proclaiming the student not yet wholly emerged from the magic spell of literature. Peeping out from behind a rack of postcards, he saw her cross the entrance hall. He followed.

“To think,” he reflected, as his unconscious quarry turned out of Great Russell Street, “that I should be following an unknown woman up the Tottenham Court Road!” He was relieved when they had ascended into the less compromising air of Chalk Farm.

“Tonight,” he decided, “I will rest content with finding out the house in which she lives, and tomorrow I will shift my lodgings into apartments as near to it as possible. Then it will be hard if I cannot find some means of making her acquaintance. I might perhaps venture to address her as she leaves the house, saying, possibly, something like, ‘Excuse me, madam,’ lifting my hat and bowing with a grave formality which should appeal to one of Eastern origin, ‘but have you seen my cat?’ I must get a cat. It would be terrible if she found out that I had no cat. But if I had a cat, and she is a cat lover, she must become quite interested. She will very probably express a fondness for the animals. At once I will reply, ‘But I have another cat, a little one. Some consider it beautiful. May I, dare I . . . beg your acceptance . .