If this answer brought a tinge of astonishment into the girl’s eyes, if she lifted one cheek out of the fur in which it nestled as if incredulous that she had heard aright and wanted the remark repeated, if she then involuntarily stepped back half a pace and scrutinised Mr. Priestley’s face with something not unlike acute misgiving, if her delicately slender form finally quivered slightly and she bit her lip as one making violent and drastic efforts to control the muscles of her face—if these things happened, I say, then Mr. Priestley was far too occupied in admiring his own devilishness to notice them. He was the sort of person to shut both eyes and wrap his head up in a rug if he saw an adventure approaching him, was he? Huh! By an impartial observer the girl might have been thought to pull herself together with an effort. “Well, now you are here,” she said, and her voice expressed nothing but asperity, “where can we talk?” Mr. Priestley looked at the face of his unexpected companion and found that it was good. He looked round at the lights of Piccadilly and found that they were good. He bestowed a casual glance on the world in general, and found that it was good, too. “Talk?” he said. “I should think we might talk anywhere.” He looked round Piccadilly Circus again and his surmise was confirmed; it was simply full of places where this charming person and he might talk. “We don’t want to be overheard, you know,” the charming person reminded him, with a touch of austerity. Mr. Priestley was in entire agreement. “Oh, no. Of course not. Good gracious, no!” While he was still speaking he knew vaguely there was something he wanted to ask; the next moment he realised what it was. Why, after all, did they not want to be overheard? “What about the lounge of the Piccadilly Palace?” suggested the girl, before he could frame the question. “Admirable!” said Mr. Priestley with enthusiasm, his question completely forgotten before his interest in the particularly delightful way in which his companion’s brows just did not meet as she frowned her perplexity over this serious matter. The thought occurred to him that for all he knew the world might have been full of feminine brows that delightfully just did not meet when their owners were charmingly perplexed, and he had never noticed this remarkable phenomenon. The next moment he knew for a certainty that there was only one possible pair of brows that could behave like that and his life hitherto had not been really wasted after all. The next coherent thing that Mr. Priestley knew was that he was sitting before a small table in the Piccadilly Palace lounge and ordering coffee. To the waiter’s bland assumption that liqueurs would be required as well the girl shook her head in a decided negative; and Mr. Priestley, who detested platitudes almost as much as false quantities, reminded himself that enough was as good as a feast, and shook his head in a decided negative too.