If you had asked the stranger what prompted him to confide so suddenly in Miss Courteen, I doubt he would have been unable to tell you. If his clerks could have seen Sir George Repington, head of the great banking house of Repington, at this moment they would have been indescribably shocked to hear him announce this piece of personal information. The clerks in busy Throgmorton Street firmly believed that the great Sir George Repington lived a desolate and severe life surrounded by calculating machines of enormous complication; they would have gasped to imagine his bleak financial solitudes disturbed by a young woman in an inn-parlour. The chief cashier, indeed, might have emitted one of his dry hacking little laughs; but then the chief cashier had grown old in the service of the Repingtons and, having known Sir George as a young man, enjoyed a privileged cynicism. Moreover, the chief cashier when he was junior clerk had carried half a score sealed notes to Thistlegrove Cottage--a diminutive paradise five or six miles along the Hounslow Road. There, amid the chirping of many linnets, young Master Repington would swear eternal fidelity while the sun-dyed sleepy air coloured his dear one's lips as deep as rubies and enchanted with gold her soft brown hair. No doubt the present scene of this small history would have awakened a delightful memory from the dusty recesses of the chief cashier's brain, for all that the end of Thistlegrove Cottage was a businesslike affair on a level with many other successful monetary transactions of the great house of Repington and Son. Phyllida was somewhat embarrassed by the sudden announcement of his relationship to that dreadful Mr. Lovely, who had lampooned the whole of the fashionable world. She wondered if the elderly gentleman was aware of his nephew's late indiscretion, whether she ought to break the news of his odium, and finally with a maid's inconsequence fell to wishing she had never eloped since the step had involved her in so awkward an adventure. Sir George, noticing her embarrassment, introduced himself, "My name is Repington, ma'am--Sir George Repington." As he said this he received the miniature from Phyllida, and having, as it were, fondled the oval for a second, replaced it in the upper left-hand pocket of his waistcoat. The introduction put Phyllida deeper than ever into a quandary. She felt the genteel movement to be a low curtsey coupled with the graceful revelation of her name, but this was just the act she could not bring herself to perform. What a vast number of polite difficulties attached themselves to an elopement, and how she wished with all her heart she had never been so foolish as to brave them unaccompanied. "The resemblance is certainly very remarkable," said Sir George Repington. Phyllida clutched this conversational straw. "I doubt, sir, 'twould ill become me to allow the compliment."