“On my former visit I met with the same reception. The girl could take care of herself. It was no business of mine. How that relation has ended I do not ask. But this one----” “This one is an entirely different matter,” said Drake, “and I will thank you not to----” But John Storm was making the sign of the cross on his breast, and saying, as one who was uttering a prayer, “God grant it is and always may be!” At the next moment he was gone from the room. The two men stood where he had left them until his footsteps had ceased on the stairs and the door had closed behind him. Then Drake cried, “Benson--a telegraph form! I must telegraph to Koenig at once.” “Yes, he'll follow her up on the double quick,” said Lord Robert. “But what matter? His face will be enough to frighten the girl. Ugh! It was the face of a death's head!” At dinner that night John Storm was more than usually silent. To break in upon his gravity, Mrs. Callender asked him what he intended to do next. “To take priest's orders without delay,” he said. “And what then?” “Then,” he said, lifting a twitching and suffering face “to make an attack on the one mighty stronghold of the devil's kingdom whereof woman is the direct and immediate victim; to tell Society over again it is an organized hypocrisy for the pursuit and demoralization of woman, and the Church that bachelorhood is not celibacy, and polygamy is against the laws of God; to look and search for the beaten and broken who lie scattered and astray in our bewildered cities, and to protect them and shelter them whatever they are, however low they have fallen, because they are my sisters and I love them.” “God bless ye, laddie! That's spoken like a man,” said the old woman, rising from her seat. But John Storm's pale face had already flushed up to the eyes, and he dropped his head as one who was ashamed. II. At eight o'clock that night John Storm was walking through the streets of Soho. The bell of a jam factory had just been rung, and a stream of young girls in big hats with gorgeous flowers and sweeping feathers were pouring out of an archway and going arm-in-arm down the pavement. Men standing in groups at street ends shouted to them as they passed, and they shouted back in shrill voices and laughed with wild joy. In an alley round one corner an organ man was playing “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” and some of the girls began to dance and sing around him. Coming to the main artery of traffic, they were almost run down by a splendid equipage which was cutting across two thoroughfares into a square, and they screamed with mock terror as the fat coachman in tippet and cockade bellowed to them to get out of the way.