“I have no doubt your story is perfectly true; but I don’t see what I can do for you,” Captain Desfrayne said, with some pity. “However, I will consider, and, if you like to come and see me to-morrow, perhaps I---- What is your name?” “Leonardo Gilardoni, sir.” The hungry, eager eyes watched as Captain Desfrayne took a note-book from his pocket and scribbled down the name, adding a brief memorandum besides. The sound of these men’s voices speaking just beneath her window had failed to attract the attention of the beautiful creature in the balcony. But now, when a sudden silence succeeded, she looked over from an undefined feeling of half-unconscious interest or curiosity. As she glanced carelessly down at the two figures, the expression on her face utterly changed. The great eyes, the hue of black velvet, opened widely, as if from terror, or an astonishment too stupendous to be controlled. For a moment she seemed unable to withdraw her gaze, fascinated, apparently. The little white hands were fiercely clenched; and if glances could kill, those two men would have rapidly traversed the valley of the shadow of death. Fortunately, glances, however baleful, fall harmless as summer lightning; and the interlocutors remained happily ignorant of the absorbed attention wherewith they were favored. In a moment or two she rose, and, standing just within the room, clutching the curtain with a half-convulsive grip, peered down malevolently into the street. “What can have brought these two men here together?” she muttered. “Do they come to seek me? I did not know they were conscious of one another’s existence. What are they doing? Why are they here? Accursed be the day I ever saw the face of either!” The visage, so wondrously beautiful in repose, looked almost hideous thus distorted by fury. She saw Captain Desfrayne put his little note-book back in his pocket, and then heard him say: “If you will come to me about--say, six or seven o’clock to-morrow evening, at my chambers in”--she missed the name of the street and the number, though she craned her white throat forward eagerly--“I will speak further to you. Do not come before that time, as I shall be absent all day.” With swift, compassionate fingers he dropped a piece of gold into the thin hand of the unhappy, friendless man before him, and then moved, as if to continue his way. The superb creature above craned out her head as far as she dared, to watch the two. Captain Desfrayne, however, seemed to be the personage she was specially desirous of following with her keen glances. To her amazement and evident consternation, he walked up to the immediately adjacent house, and rang the bell. The door opened, and he disappeared. The shabby, half-slouching figure of the supplicant for help shuffled off in the other direction, toward Westbourne Grove, and vanished from out the square.