In spite of this uncanny idea, Mrs. Breezy loved her little girl, adopted though she seemed to be, and constant anxiety ran through her heart like a thread behind a needle. If any man had spoken to _her_ on the street, she would have screamed or called a policeman. She certainly would have been immediately covered with goose flesh. Beyond that, if she had ever discovered that she had been born with the power to stir the feelings of men at first sight, as music stirs the emotions of an audience or wind the surface of water, she would have been tempted to have turned Catholic and taken the veil. Not an evening went by, therefore, that did not find Mrs. Breezy on the step of the shop in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, looking anxiously up and down for the appearance of Lola among the heterogeneous crowd which infested that street. Always she expected to see at her side a man, perhaps _the_ man who would take her child away. She had her worries, poor little woman, more perhaps than most mothers. That evening, the light reluctant to leave the sky, Spring’s hand upon the city trees, Lola did bring some one home,—a woman. III Miss Breezy, sister of John, made a point of spending every Thursday evening at the neat and gleaming shop in Queen’s Road. It was her night off. Sometimes she turned up with tickets for the theater given to her by the great lady to whom she acted as housekeeper, sometimes to a concert and once or twice during the season for the opera. If there were only two tickets, it was always Lola who enjoyed the other. Mr. and Mrs. Breezy were contented to hear the child’s account of what they gladly missed on her behalf. Frequently they got more from the girl’s description than they would have received had they used the tickets themselves. It was this woman who unconsciously had made Fallaray the hero of Lola’s dreams. She had brought all the latest gossip from the Fallaray house in which she had served since that strange wedding ten years before, when the son of the Minister for Education, himself in the House of Commons, had gone in a sort of trance to St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and come out of it surprised to find himself married to the eldest daughter of the Marquis of Amesbury,—the brilliant, beautiful, harum-scarum member of a pre-war set that had given England many rude shocks, stepped over all the conventions of an already careless age and done “stunts” which sent a thrill of horror and amazement all through the body of the old British Lion; a set whose cynicism, egotism, perversion, hobnobbing with political enemies, manufacture of erotic poetry and ribald jests had spread like an epidemic.