England’s the country for me, and London is the focus of it. You can live like a Christian here, and enjoy all the refinements and decencies of life for a reasonable consideration. How my heart leaped when I saw the old, gray, sooty walls looming up through the river haze--I thought it best to sneak by the back way, because if I go up the front stairs and ring the bell there may be loiterers round who had seen Laura the Lady before, and might become impertinently curious about her future movements. And then when I saw Tom waiting for me--my own Tom, that I lawfully married, in a burst of affection, three years ago, at Leamington--I shouted out greetings, and danced on the deck, and waved my handkerchief. It was worth while having lived in Chicago for a year to come back to London and Tom and a little furnished flat in Knightsbridge. We were very respectable and quiet for a month--just a few callers climbing up the front stairs, and demure female tea-parties at intervals. I bought plants to put in the windows, and did knitting in a conspicuous solitude which the neighbors could overlook. When I saw the maiden lady opposite scrutinizing me through an opera-glass I felt like sending her my marriage certificate to run her eye over and return. We even hired a maid of all work from an agency as a touch of local color on this worthy domestic picture. But when the Castlecourt diamond scheme began to ripen I nagged at her till she was impudent and bundled her off. Maud Durlan came in then, put on a cap and apron, and played her part a good deal better than she used to when she acted soubrettes in the vaudeville. We were two weeks lying low, maturing our plans, tho when I left Chicago I knew what I was coming back for. Outwardly all was the same as usual--the decent callers still climbed the front stairs, and elderly ladies who, without any stretch of imagination, might have been my mother and aunts, dropped in for tea. I used to wonder how the people on the floor below--they were the family of a man who made rubber tires for bicycles--would have felt if they could have seen Maud, our neat and respectable slavy, sitting with the French heels of her slippers caught on the third shelf of the bookcase, dropping cigarette ashes into the waste-paper basket. When all was ready, Tom and I left for a “business” trip on the Continent. We went away in a four-wheeler, driven by Handsome Harry, the top piled with luggage, my face at the window smiling a last, cautioning good-by at Maud. Five days later, under the name of Sara Dwight, I was installed as housemaid on the third floor of Burridge’s Hotel.