There were two women in Cape Town who were most unhappily affected by this sordid intrigue, Mrs Lawless, and the girl who had made a hero of the man, and who worshipped him with the extravagance of a youthful, unsophisticated mind. For a long while Julie Weeber refused to admit that there was anything unusual in Lawless' friendship with the handsome demi-mondaine; but in her heart she was jealous of the friendship, and when she saw them together she hated the woman with the complacently smiling, painted lips, and the mocking eyes. Her distress was primarily due to the knowledge that by his actions he was separating himself from her. She would have condoned anything for the gratification of seeing and talking with him occasionally. But intercourse was out of the question; not only did her mother assert that she would neither receive him in future nor permit her daughters to acknowledge him, but Lawless himself held aloof. Once when she passed him in the street driving with the woman, although she knew he had seen her, he deliberately turned his face aside. It wounded the girl deeply. "Why should he treat me like that?" she asked herself passionately... "It isn't fair to me." She encountered him again a few days later. He was alone, walking towards the city. Julie had been to see a friend some distance out, and was cycling homeward when she overtook him. It was evening. The sun had dipped below the horizon; where it had disappeared the sky still glowed with changing colours that paled perceptibly before the oncome of precipitate night which in Africa follows rapidly on the path of the vanished day. A shaft of the fading colour in the sky glanced earthwards and glowed in Julie Weeber's cheeks when she recognised the solitary pedestrian striding along the middle of the road. She slackened speed as she drew near to him, and glanced swiftly about her. No one was in sight, not even a Kaffir; though had a crowd been there to witness her actions she would probably have behaved in exactly the same way. She pedalled her machine alongside the tall, familiar figure, and slipped to the ground. Lawless glanced round. He looked surprised, he also looked--Julie observed it--pleased. "How do you do?" she said, deliberately holding out her hand. "Isn't it a beautiful evening?" He smiled involuntarily at this determined effort at conversation, and answered that such was his opinion also. "Are you walking into town?" she asked. "I am, too." "You mean, you are riding," he corrected. "I'm not," the girl returned imperturbably. "I hate cycling against the wind. I only stuck to my machine because it's lonely walking by oneself." "In that case," he said, stepping behind her and relieving her of the charge of the cycle, "you must let me wheel this."