"Ah, my dear fellow," observed my friend, with a smile, "I very much fear that that appointment won't be kept. Men such as they evidently are will hardly risk a meeting. On reflection, the individual, whoever he is, will see that he has given himself away, and his natural caution will prevent him from going near St. James's Park." "Well, I only hope he does meet me," I observed. "So do I. But to my mind such a circumstance is entirely out of the question. You see he went to call-boxes in order to avoid detection." "The curious thing is, that if it were the same man who rang up each time he must have travelled from one place to another in an amazingly rapid manner." "There might be two persons," he suggested. "Of course there might," I answered. "But I think not. The girl at the exchange evidently recognised the voice of the persistent inquirer." "I'm glad I came down--very glad," he said. "I went over to see Lily, but she's gone to Ipswich with her aunt, an old lady who feared to travel alone. It appears she wrote to me this morning, but the letter has missed the post, I suppose. It will come to-morrow morning." "You had your journey to Peckham for nothing, then?" "Yes," he answered. "She ought to have sent me a wire. Just like a woman." I knew Lily Lowry, the pretty friend of Dick Cleugh, very well indeed. I did not know that he actually loved her. There was undoubtedly a mutual friendship between them, but nevertheless he often would go for a month and see nothing of her. The daughter of a struggling shopkeeper near the _Elephant and Castle_, she had been compelled to seek her own living, and was at present assistant at a large cheap draper's in Rye Lane, Peckham. Setting the _convenances_ at naught, as became a London girl of the present decade, she had many times visited our dingy abode. I had always suspected that the love was on her side, for she was always giving him various little things--embroidered pouches, handkerchiefs and those semi-useful articles with which girls delight the men they love.