“Yes,” said Mrs. Gibbons, raising her blue and guileless eyes to his. “I didn’t know it was going so soon. I was looking for my husband.” The policeman’s face changed from solicitude to the cheerful acceptance of a familiar situation. “Give ye the slip, did he? A lady like you, too! Sure he’s the bad lot, and not wort’ your lookin’ for. Now don’t be frettin’ yourself, the Queen couldn’t be safer. I’m wid you till the car comes. ’Tis an hour away.” “It’s very good of you,” said Mrs. Gibbons, gratefully. Of all the chances and changes of this wild Walpurgis night, there could be nothing stranger than this, that she, Nita Gibbons, should be sitting alone amid the dark marshes, in front of a Jersey “gin-mill,” at half-past two o’clock in the morning. It was so entirely past all imagining that frenzy had left her. She would probably never get home again, but she had ceased to struggle against fate. She sat there instead, passive, her slight figure bent against the cold night wind, and her hair half falling down under her battered hat, looking dreamily at the late twinkling stars in the black sky, and the gloomy car-house opposite, and at the policeman who walked up and down through the shadows. He swayed a little unsteadily, but he represented the guardianship of the law. Once he came close to her and asked encouragingly, “Would ye like a doggy?” “What kind?” said Mrs. Gibbons, with a hazy fear of too large a protective animal. He pointed over his shoulder towards the stationary light down the road. “The kind they do be havin’ in the Owl Wagon, down there—frankfooties or doggies, ’tis the same. I could get ye wan, wid a roll; they’re cleaned out in the s’loon here.” “Thank you, I’d rather not eat,” said Mrs. Gibbons in haste, and then started nervously as the noise of footsteps running broke upon the ear. The three men who had followed the thief came in sight from the direction in which they had fled from the car. One called out, “Good-night, I’m going to hoof it home!” And another voice also called, “Glad you got your pocketbook back again—ought to have got the fellow, too.” The third said nothing, as he came towards the platform. Mrs. Gibbons turned her head away. The next instant a voice of amazement said, “_Nita!_ You here!” and, looking up, she saw her husband. “Oh, Arnold, Arnold!” She stopped short in view of his face. “Oh, Arnold, I don’t wonder you’re surprised to see me, dear, but I’ve been looking for you!” “Looking for _me_! Nita! _Nita!_ NITA!” The astonishment in his voice held something ominous in it. She clung to his arm with both hands, as she rose with him, and hardly realized, in her excited explaining and explaining, that she was being borne off down the road without waiting for the car, at a tremendous pace, and still spasmodically explaining to a portentous silence. When he spoke at last it was in a tone that sounded dangerous: “So the Worthingtons went off and _left_ you?”