The Queen's Hall looked shabby in the evening light, but Miss Rand liked that; it heightened her sense of the splendour within--Beethoven and Wagner and Brahms needed no illumination--it was your musical comedy demanded that. Miss Rand liked good music. Then there was the Polytechnic with wonderful offers in the windows enticing you to see Rome for eleven guineas, and Paris for three, and there was a hat shop with three glorious hats wickedly dangling on poles, and there was a pastry-cook's, a tobacconist's, and a theatre agency: all this variety paving the way between music and religion and the whirling, tossing, heaving melodrama of Oxford Circus. Miss Rand loved Oxford Circus. It was like the sea in that it was never from one moment to another the same. Miss Rand knew the way that it had of piling the melodrama up and up, faster and faster, wilder and wilder, bursting into a frantio climax and then sinking back, for hours perhaps, into comparative silence. She knew all its moods, from its broom and milkman mood in the early morning, to its soiled and slinking mood somewhere between midnight and one o'clock. Just now it was getting ready for the evening. Up Regent Street the cabs and buses were straining, the flower women with their baskets were bunched in splashes of colour against the distant outline of the Round Church. Out of every door people were pouring, and in the middle of the Circus three of the four lines of traffic were turned suddenly into something sleepy and indifferent by the hand of a policeman. For an instant the restless movement seemed to be crystallized--the hansoms, the bicycles, the omnibuses, the carts were all held, then at a sign the flow and interflow had begun once more; life was hurled in and hurled out again, stirred and tossed and turned, as though some giant cook were up in the heavens busy over a giant pudding. And the light faded and the lamps came out, and Miss Rand, walking through two streets that were as dark and secret as though they were spying on the Circus and were going to give all its secrets away very shortly, passed into Saxton Square. To-night Miss Rand had more to think about than Oxford Circus. She was tired after all the work that there had been during the last few days, and she always noticed that it was when she was tired that she was ready to imagine things. She had been imagining things all day and had found it really difficult to keep steadily to her proper work, but out and beyond her imaginations there was, before her, this definite, tremendous fact--namely, that she would find, this evening, on entering her little drawing-room, that Mr. Francis Breton was being entertained at tea by her sister and mother.