higher than he had thought, her eyebrows more oblique--a gipsy look! Her eyes, dark and lustrous as a hound puppy’s, smiled at him, and he said in his rather high voice: “I came back to ask you something.” “Yes, sir.” “Do you know a dark man with a thin face and a slight squint, who’s been in the Army?” “What’s his name, sir?” “I don’t know; but he followed me from here, and tried to blackmail me on the Embankment. You know what blackmail is?” “No, sir.” Feline, swift, furtive, she had passed him and taken up her baby, slanting her dark glance at him from behind it. Granter experienced a very queer sensation. Really it was as if--though he disliked poetic emphasis--as if he had suddenly seen something pre-civilised, pre-human, snake-like, cat-like, monkey-like too, in those dark sliding eyes and that yellow baby. She was in it; or, if not in it, she knew of it! “A dangerous game, that,” he said. “Tell him--for his own good--he had better drop it.” And, while he went, very square, downstairs, he thought: ‘This is one of the finest opportunities you ever had for getting to the bottom of human nature, and you’re running away from it.’ So strongly did this thought obsess him that he halted, in two minds, outside. A chauffeur, who was cleaning his car, looked at him curiously. Charles Granter moved away. II When he reached the little drawing-room of their flat his wife was making tea. She was rather short, with a good figure, and brown eyes in a flattish face, powdered and by no means unattractive. She had Slav blood in her--Polish; and Granter never now confided to her the finer shades of his thoughts and conduct because she had long made him feel himself her superior in moral sensibility. He had no wish to feel superior--it was often very awkward; but he could not help it. In view of this attempt at blackmail, more than awkward. It was extraordinarily unpleasant to fall from a pedestal on which he did not wish to be. He sat down, very large, in a lacquered chair with black cushions, spoke of the leaves turning, saw her look at him and smile, and felt that she knew he was disturbed. “Do you ever wonder,” he said, tinkling his teaspoon, “about the lives that other people live?” “What sort of people, Charles?” “Oh--not our sort; match-sellers, don’t you know, flower-sellers, people down and out?” “No, I don’t think I do.” If only he could tell her of this monstrous incident without slipping from his pedestal! “It interests me enormously; there are such queer depths to reach, don’t you know.” Her smile seemed to answer: ‘You don’t reach the depths in me.’ And it was true. She was very Slav, with the warm gleam in her eyes and the opaque powdered skin of her comely face. An enigma--flatly an enigma! There were deep waters below the pedestal, like--like Philæ, with columns still standing in the middle of the Nile Dam. Absurd thought! “I’ve often wondered,” he said, “how I should feel if I were down and out.”