They walked on quickly to Bruton Street. The dogs made conversation impossible. If they were on the chain it was one long battle between them and their leader. If they were let loose, it seemed to Sir Wilfrid that they ranged every area on the march, and attacked all elderly gentlemen and most errand-boys. "Do you always take them out?" he asked, when both he and his companion were crimson and out of breath. "Always." "Do you like dogs?" "I used to. Perhaps some day I shall again." "As for me, I wish they had but one neck!" said Sir Wilfrid, who had but just succeeded in dragging Max, the bigger of the two, out of the interior of a pastry-cook's hand-cart which had been rashly left with doors open for a few minutes in the street, while its responsible guardian was gossiping in an adjacent kitchen. Mademoiselle Julie meanwhile was wrestling with Nero, the younger, who had dived to the very heart of a peculiarly unsavory dust-box, standing near the entrance of a mews. "So you commonly go through the streets of London in this whirlwind?" asked Sir Wilfrid, again, incredulous, when at last they had landed their charges safe at the Bruton Street door. "Morning and evening," said Mademoiselle Julie, smiling. Then she addressed the butler: "Tell Lady Henry, please, that I shall be at home in half an hour." As they turned westward, the winter streets were gay with lights and full of people. Sir Wilfrid was presently conscious that among all the handsome and well-dressed women who brushed past them, Mademoiselle Le Breton more than held her own. She reminded him now not so much of her mother as of Marriott Dalrymple. Sir Wilfrid had first seen this woman's father at Damascus, when Dalrymple, at twenty-six, was beginning the series of Eastern journeys which had made him famous. He remembered the brillance of the youth; the power, physical and mental, which radiated from him, making all things easy; the scorn of mediocrity, the incapacity for subordination. "I should like you to understand," said the lady beside him, "that I came to Lady Henry prepared to do my very best." "I am sure of that," said Sir Wilfrid, hastily recalling his thoughts from Damascus. "And you must have had a very difficult task." Mademoiselle Le Breton shrugged her shoulders. "I knew, of course, it must be difficult. And as to the drudgery of it--the dogs, and that kind of thing--nothing of that sort matters to me in the least. But I cannot be humiliated before those who have become my friends, entirely because Lady Henry wished it to be so." "Lady Henry at first showed you every confidence?" "After the first month or two she put everything into my hands--her household, her receptions, her letters, you may almost say her whole social existence. She trusted me with all her secrets." ("No, no, my dear lady," thought Sir Wilfrid.) "She let me help her with all her affairs. And, honestly, I did all I could to make her life easy." "That I understand from herself."