He nodded, and she paid away her last penny. After all, even if Monkley and her father did owe Mrs. Meares a good deal of money, Sylvia did not believe she would have her arrested. She would surely be too much interested to find that she was a girl and not a boy. Sylvia laughed when she thought of Jay Cohen in the slop-pail, for she remembered the baboon in Lillie Road, and she wondered if Clara was still there. What a lot she would have to tell Mrs. Meares, and if the baron had not left she would ask him why he had attacked her in that extraordinary way when she went to the party in Redcliffe Gardens. That was more than two years ago now. Sylvia wished she had gone to Lillie Road with Arthur Madden when she had some money and could have paid Mrs. Meares what was owing to her. Now she had not a penny in the world; she had not even any clothes. The omnibus jogged on, and Sylvia's thoughts jogged with it. "I wonder if I shall always have adventures," she said to herself, "but I wish I could sometimes have adventures that have nothing to do with love. It's such a nuisance to be always running away for the same reason. It's such a stupid reason. But it's rather jolly to run away. It's more fun than being like that girl in front." She contemplated a girl of about her own age, to whom an elderly woman was pointing out the St. James's Hall with a kind of suppressed excitement, a fever of unsatisfied pleasure. "You've never been to the Moore and Burgess minstrels, have you, dear?" she was saying. "We _must_ get your father to take us some afternoon. Look at the people coming out." The girl looked dutifully, but Sylvia thought it was more amusing to look at the people struggling to mount omnibuses already full. She wondered what that girl would have done with somebody like Danny Lewis, and she felt sorry for the prim and dutiful young creature who could never see Jay Cohen sitting in a slop-pail. Sylvia burst into a loud laugh, and a stout woman who was occupying three-quarters of her seat edged away from her a little. "We shall be late for tea," said the elderly woman in an ecstasy of dissipation, when she saw the clock at Hyde Park Corner. "We sha'n't be home till after six. We ought to have had tea at King's Cross." The elderly woman was still talking about tea when they stopped at Sloane Street, and Sylvia's counterpart was still returning polite answers to her speculation; when they got down at South Kensington Station the last thing Sylvia heard was a suggestion that perhaps it might be possible to arrange for dinner to be a quarter of an hour earlier. It was dark when Sylvia reached the house in Lillie Road and she hoped very much that Clara would open the door; but another servant came, and when she asked for Mrs. Meares a sudden alarm caught her that Mrs. Meares might no longer be here and that she would be left alone in the night without a penny in the world. But Mrs. Meares was in.