Happily Mrs. Magglesark was not a quick thinker. “Yes; I saw him too,” she said, and Eleanor, in terror that the telling of the story should go elsewhere, trod on the opening of the cook’s narrative. “Me and cook--that is to say cook and I--were on top of a ’bus last Sunday----” “In Knightsbridge.” Thus the cook claimed her equal share of the copyright. “We were laughing and talking when cook said ‘Look, Nelly--there’s the boss.’” “I said ‘If that isn’t his nibs!’” amended Mrs. Magglesark. “And there he was!” said Eleanor. “With a girl, very tall and dressed in black, and he was holding her hand!” “In the street?” incredulously. “In the car: from the top of a ’bus you can look down into cars, if they’re open. Many a sight I’ve seen!” “Was she pretty?” asked Trenter, man-like. Eleanor’s lips pursed. “Well, I suppose some people would call her pretty. Did you think she was pretty, cook?” Mrs. Magglesark, having reached the age when she regarded all young people as passable, thought she was pretty. “Holding her hand!” Trenter was very thoughtful. “It wasn’t Mrs. van Oynne?” “Who is she?” “She’s been here twice to tea. An American lady, rather well-dressed. Heloise! That’s her name. And a good-looker. She usually wears black and paradise feathers.” “_She_ wore paradise feathers!” said cook and Eleanor together. Trenter nodded. “That’s her,” he said, “but there’s nothing in it. She’s a highbrow. Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn’t make head or tail of.” Eleanor was impressed. “Funny for him to be discussing eggs,” she said. It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of speech. Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel, and they were comparatively alone. “There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you, Heloise,” he said softly. “A month! It almost seems incredible! If our theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation ...?” Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though the words were spoken: “How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!” On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought. “What is so fine about friendship,” Gordon was going on, “is that we have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism.”