But accident--Lauriston was the last person in the world to call it fate--threw him within a fortnight again in the way of the mysterious lady. He was returning one afternoon from Fitzroy Square, after a call at the house of the old officer whose dinner-party had indirectly led to the adventure, when by pure accident he found himself in Mary Street, opposite to the very house where his mysterious introduction had taken place. He retained a vivid enough recollection of all the circumstances to feel a strange shock, half pleasure, half a vague terror, when the red-lettered inscription “Rahas and Fanah, Oriental Merchants,” with the star and crescent underneath, caught his eye. He stopped involuntarily, and glanced up at the windows. Nothing in the daylight appearance of the house gave any indication of the luxurious glories within. The blinds of the two windows in which the lights had shone on the evening of his startling visit were half drawn down, and there was no sign of the carved lattice-work which he remembered so clearly. The third window on the first-floor was open, and while he looked the curtain--not a gorgeous hanging of bullion-embroidered tapestry, but the common white lace curtain of commerce--moved, and the black curly head of a young girl appeared at the window. It was the mysterious lady of the lamps. Although seen thus in the strong afternoon sunlight, apparently dressed like an ordinary English girl in a silk dress that was a sort of green shot with pale grey, she produced an entirely different impression on him from that of his first sight of her, the charm of the warm-tinted skin and the glowing eyes was as great for him as ever. He raised his hat, and she beckoned to him with a coquettish and mischievous little curve of her tiny fore-finger under her chin. He felt his heart leap up, and though, when she whirled round and disappeared from the window, he tried to walk on, telling himself vehemently that he should be worse than a fool to yield to the magnetic attraction this dark-skinned elf seemed to exercise upon him, he relaxed his speed, trying to assure himself that it was too hot to race along like a postman. But at the creaking of a door in the street behind him he was obliged to look back, and there, peeping out like a tiny enchantress in this dingy London wilderness of dirty, screaming children, costers with their barrows, the public-house loafer and the catsmeat man, stood the girl, laughing at him, and inviting him with bewitching eyes and dazzling teeth, her head bent downwards to avoid the blaze of the sun, which shone full on her head and on the little ivory hand which she held up against her dusky soft black hair as a most inadequate screen.