"About the Savoy," he went on. "I want to take you there, because I know a woman staying in the hotel--a woman old enough to be your mother--who'll look after you, to please me, till we're married. Afterward you'll be nice to her, and that will be doing her a good turn, because she's apt to be lonesome in London. She's the widow of a Spanish Count, and has lived in the Argentine, but I met her in New York. She knows all about me--or enough--and if she'd been in the restaurant at dinner this evening she could have done for me what you did. I had reason to think she would be there when I bolted in to get out of a fix. But she was missing. Are you sorry?" "If she'd been there, you would have gone to her table and sat down, and we--should never have met!" Annesley thought aloud. "How strange! Just that _little_ thing--your friend being out to dinner--and our whole lives are to be changed. Oh, _you_ must be sorry?" "I tell you, meeting you and winning you in this way is worth the best ten years of my life. But you haven't answered my question." "I'll answer it now!" cried the girl. "Meeting you is worth _all_ the years of my life! I'm not much of a princess, but you _are_ St. George." "St. George!" he echoed, a ring of bitterness under his laugh. "That's the first time I've been called a saint, and I'm afraid it will be the last. I can't live up to that, but--if I can give you a happy life, and a few of the beautiful things you deserve, why, it's _something_! Besides, I'm going to worship my princess. I'd give anything to show you how I--but no. I was good before, when I was tempted to kiss you. You're at my mercy now, in a way, all the more because I'm taking you from your old existence to one you don't know. "I sha'n't ask to kiss you--except maybe your little hand if you don't mind--until the moment you're my wife. Meantime, I'll try to grow a bit more like what your lover ought to be; and later I shall kiss you enough to make up for lost time." If, five hours ago, any one had told Annesley Grayle that she would wish to have a strange man take her in his arms and kiss her she would have felt insulted. Yet so it was. She was sorry that he was so scrupulous. She longed to have him hold her against his heart. The thought thrilled her like an electric shock a thousand times more powerful than the tingling which had flashed up her arm at the first touch of his hand, though even that had seemed terrifying then. But she sat still in her corner of the taxi, and gave him no answer, lest she should betray herself. Her silence, after the warmth of his words, seemed cold. Perhaps he felt it so, for he went on after an instant's pause, as if he had waited for something in vain, and his tone was changed. Annesley thought it, by contrast, almost businesslike.