“You--lonely!” her eyes darkened with surprise. “Why, you can go anywhere you like in all London, you have not to sit alone evening after evening till----” “No, but you see I don’t know anywhere I want to go,” he interrupted. “And if we’re both here, and both lonely, why--I think we may as well talk to one another.” They were moving slowly along the crowded promenade on their way to the stairs, and the languid grace of the girl’s steps was apparent. “Are you tired?” he said suddenly. “You look pale.” “I’m always pale.” A swift intuition flashed over him. “I don’t think,” he observed deliberately, “that you have had any dinner!” Miss Trelane flushed--exquisitely. The remembrance of the supper of bread and butter, which pride had made her forego, was haunting her. She had eaten nothing since tea at five o’clock. She raised her head haughtily, as a woman of the world would have done, and caught a look on her companion’s face that made her suddenly childlike again. “I--I didn’t wait,” she stammered. Her companion stopped at a vacant table, and put her into a chair. “Now that I think of it, I am hungry myself,” he observed, signaling to a waiter, and then ordering sandwiches and some liquor. He sat looking at this waif from some other world as she ate the sandwiches; the fiery cherry brandy made her less pale, the depths of her strange eyes less somber. His first theory had been right: she was very young. But the beautiful face was prophetic of tragedy and passion; the scarlet lips cynical. She looked at him, raising slow white lids, till he seemed to see unfathomable depths in her clear green eyes. “Do you know you are the first person who has ever been kind to me in all my life?” she said. “Tell me, why are you kind?” There was in her voice only calm inquiry, nothing to tell him that this strange, pale girl was filled with passionate gratitude. “I’m not kind; it is a pleasure to sit and talk to you. You forget that.” His manner was to the girl what it would have been to a duchess. “But it’s getting late, and I’m going to take you home.” He raised his eyebrows a little as he sat by her in a hansom and heard her give the man an address in Colbourne Square; it was not exactly a haunt of poverty, and this girl was nearly out at elbows. “You live there with your mother?” he said involuntarily. She laughed with a curious mockery of mirth. “Yes, but you don’t know who I am, and I won’t tell you.” “Don’t you want to know who I am?” he asked, somewhat piqued. “My name----” “Don’t tell me!” stopping him with a quick coldness. “I don’t want to know. You have been kind to me--I’ll remember you by that best. No one else ever was.” “I wonder,” he said abruptly, “if I will ever see you again.” “Do you wish to?” He nodded, and with a sudden flash of her spirit Ismay Trelane determined to see him again if she had to tramp the world for a sight of his face.