"Gawd's frightful hard on women," the poor creature beside me moans, and lo, the little dumb lieutenant is by her side miraculously, and like a shifting kaleidoscope the crowd lets them through and she kneels, shaking, by the drum. Their white faces heap in layers before me; drawn, wolfish, brutal in the flaring lights they peer and gasp and sob, like uncouth inhabitants of another world--wait a bit, Jerry, it is your world, just the same, and perhaps you are responsible for it? Ugh! "I _need_ Thee ..." "Gad, it's little Josefa!" The clear English voice cuts across the hush, and, "What a lark!" answers a deeper bass. He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays, that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Constituency; but if by any odd chance he should read this, I will wager he forgets what he is actually looking at for a moment and sees against the black shadows and rising night fog of Trafalgar Square a beautiful, black-robed woman in red corals lifted to an empty barrow by two eager club-dandies and held there by a gigantic Guardsman--the best fencer in Europe, once! Oh, Bertie, the Right Honourable now, the always honourable then, do you know that there were tears on your pink cheeks? And your noble friend, who broke up his establishment in St. John's Wood the next day and founded the Little Order of the Sons of St. Francis, does he know that the lightning stroke that blinded him like Saul of Tarsus and sent him reeling from Piccadilly to the slums, lighted for a moment, as it fell, the way of a dazed, rheumatic bachelor from America, who saw the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his forehead as he held his corner of the barrow and Margarita drove him to his God? "Ev'ry _hour_ I _need_ Thee ..." The fog rolls over us, the lights flare through a sea of mist; the Honourable Bertie produces a hansom, from his pocket apparently, and the wild, dark etching is wiped out like a child's picture on a slate. Margarita falls asleep on my shoulder, I gain my usual philosophical control, gradually, and realise, now the echoes of that agonised pleading have ceased to disturb my soul, that the woman beside me is not even a Christian, technically speaking, and knew not, literally, what she did!