The lady and the guitar certainly passed the night at Hill View Villa, but when his mother, very angry and very frightened, came up with him at about noon, the house looked just as usual, and no one was there but the charwoman. "An adventuress! I told you so!" said his mother at once--and the young man sat down at his study table and looked at the title of his article on "The Decadence of Criticism." It was surely a very long time ago that he had written that. And he sat there thinking, till his mother's voice roused him. "The silver is all right, thank goodness," she said, "but your banjo girl has taken a pair of your sister's silk stockings, and those new shoes of hers with the silver buckles--and she's left _these_." She held out a pair of little patent leather shoes, very worn and dusty--the slender silken web of a black stocking, brown with dust, hung from her hand. He answered nothing. She spent the rest of that day in searching the house for further losses, but all things were in their place, except the silver-handled button-hook--and that, as even his sister owned, had been missing for months. Yet his family would never leave him to keep house alone again: they said he is not to be trusted. And perhaps they are right. The half dozen pairs of embroidered silk stockings and the dainty French silver-buckled shoes, which arrived a month later addressed to Miss ----, Hill View Villa, only confirmed their distrust. _He_ must have had them sent--that tambourine girl could never have afforded these--why, they were pure silk--and the quality! It was plain that his castanet girl--his mother and sister took a pleasure in crediting her daily with some fresh and unpleasing instrument--could have had neither taste, money, nor honesty to such a point as this. As for the young man, he bore it all very meekly, only he was glad when his essays on the decadence of things in general led to a berth on the staff of a big daily, and made it possible for him to take rooms in town--because he had grown weary of living with his family, and of hearing so constantly that She played the bones and the big drum and the concertina, and that She was a twopenny adventuress who stole his sister's shoes and stockings. He prefers to sit in his quiet room in the Temple, and to remember that she played the guitar and sang sweetly--that she had a mouth like a tired child's mouth, that her eyes were like stars, and that she kissed him--on both cheeks--and that he kissed--her hand only--as the scandalised suburb knows. THE MAN WITH THE BOOTS