'Perhaps, after all, if we lay low,' he said, smiling more broadly. 'It would be nuts for Stonor to catch us sitting at the feet of Mrs. Thomas.' He positively chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. He had slipped back into his corner, but he couldn't help craning his neck to watch those two leaning over the door of the hansom, while they discussed some point with animation. Several times the man raised his hand as if to give an order through the trap door. Each time Sophia laughingly arrested him. 'He wants to go on,' reported Borrodaile, sympathetically. 'She wants him to wait a minute. Now he's jumped out. What's he--looking for another hansom? No--now _she's_ out. Bless me, she's shaking hands with him. He's back in the hansom!--driving away. Sophia's actually---- 'Pon my soul, I don't know what's come over the women! I'm rather relieved on the whole.' He turned round and spoke into Vida's ear. 'I've been a little sorry for Sophia. She's never had the smallest interest in any man but that cousin of hers--and, of course, it's quite hopeless.' Vida sat perfectly motionless, back to the speaker, back to the disappearing hansom, staring at the parapet. 'You can turn round now--quite safe. Sophia's out of range. Poor Sophia!' After a little pause, 'Of course you know Stonor?' 'Why, of course.' 'Oh, well, my distinguished cousin used not to be so hard to get hold of--not in the old days when we were seeing so much of your father.' 'That must have been when I was in the schoolroom--wasn't it?' He turned suddenly and looked at her. 'I'd forgotten. You know Geoffrey, and you don't like him. I saw that once before.' 'Once before?' she echoed. He reminded her of the time she hurried away from Ulland House to Bishopsmead. '_I_ wasn't deceived,' he said, with his look of smiling malice. 'You didn't care two pins about your Cousin Mary and her influenza.' Vida moved her expressionless face a little to the right. 'I can see Sophia. But she's listening to the speech;' and Vida herself, with something of an effort, seemed now to be following the sordid experiences of a girl that the speaker had befriended some years before. It was through this girl, the mauve matron said, that she herself had come into touch with the abject poor. She took a big barrack of a house in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and it became known that there she received and helped both men and women. 'I sympathized with the men, but it was the things the women told me that appalled me. They were too bad to be entirely believed, but I wrote them down. They haunted me. I investigated. I found I had no excuse for doubting those stories.' 'This woman's a find,' Vida whispered to the chairman. Ernestine shook her head. 'Why, she's making a first-rate speech!' said Vida, astonished. 'There's nobody here who will care about it.' 'Why do you say that?'