Feeling, and looking, more foolish than I remember ever to have felt and looked before, I waded clumsily to the bank, telling myself, by way of comfort, that her curt dismissal and her sharp words were the result only of the inevitable reaction which comes after a time of tension and nerve strain. But from a clump of rushes, behind which I had reason to think my late rescuer lay hidden, came a sound suspiciously like suppressed laughter; and in somewhat of a temper--for no one likes to be ridiculed by a beautiful woman--I clambered up the bank, an ungainly figure, on all fours. Again came that rippling music from behind the rushes; so, with a very scarlet face, and with as upright a carriage of head and body as I could assume--a carriage, which I may say for the benefit of the reader was intended to express wounded dignity, but which I had a sneaking suspicion savoured more of self-conscious stiffness and injured pride--I walked angrily away, some verses by Austin Dobson running in my head: "And that's how I lost her--a jewel, _Incognita_--one in a crowd, Nor prudent enough to be cruel, Nor worldly enough to be proud." "Only _my_ Incognita," I said to myself as I entered the hotel, "is 'prudent enough to be cruel' and 'worldly enough to be proud.' Never mind! I've found her, and by heaven! if mortal man can do it, I'll win her yet. How lovely she looked! How divinely lovely! And was there ever a woman since the world began with such beautiful hands?" At this point my meditations were interrupted by the entrance of the waiter with an express letter in his hand for me, marked "Very Urgent." It was from the editor of the _Charing Cross Magazine_. "Dear Mr. Rissler," it ran. "Waldorf, the American millionaire, has bought the magazine. He's got a friend who has done some rather bad drawings of what he thinks looks like the inside of an Opium Den. But the chief has bought them, and has promised his friend to have an article written up to them, to go into the next number. "You're the man to do it, and I want you to come back by first train, so as to root out an East End Opium Den this very night, and let us have copy to-morrow. Don't fail." "H'm!" I said to myself, twiddling the letter between my fingers. "What a nuisance! I shall never rest till I have found out all about my Lady of the Lake, and I meant to have begun investigations this very night. But a poor devil of a writer of magazine articles and detective stories can't afford to offend the powers that be--especially so influential an editor as Harrison, or so wealthy a proprietor as Waldorf. So to London I must go, worse luck: to London I must go!" Within half an hour I had changed my clothes, packed, paid my bill, and was in the train.