“You’ll make yourself a nuisance. Moreover,” Tillizinni said as a bright idea struck him, “Miss Yale will not unnaturally think that we regard our rescue of her as giving us the right of entrance into the house at all inconvenient hours of the day and night.” His face fell, and he made no attempt to put his threat of calling into execution. Indeed, during the next few days he was so busy with his preparation for departure, that Tillizinni hoped that his infatuation had died a natural death. When, later, he mentioned the material prospects of the Yales, Tillizinni was sufficiently indiscreet as to suggest that they might be well left to work out their own salvation. “It is to such unsympathetic pharisaical souls as yours,” he said, amongst other things, “that we owe the shocking and cynical disregard for infant life in England, the deterioration of the national physique, the growth of anti-militist in France.” On the fourth day after the abduction, Talham called. At four o’clock in the afternoon he issued from his room at the Pall Mall Palace Hotel arrayed like a modern Solomon in all his glory. From the tips of his enamelled American shoes, to the crown of his glossy Bond Street hat, he was the man about town. In an hour and a half, considerably agitated, he called upon Tillizinni. Whatever had happened he did not say, but he directed the vials of his wrath upon two gentlemen who had had the singular bad taste to be present, and to monopolise much of the lady’s time during Talham’s visit. Talham would have sent them out, but they had apparently called to take the girl out to a “five o’clock.” “It was impossible to say what I wanted to say,” he said moodily, striding up and down the apartment, “so I hit upon a ruse.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What was the ruse?” asked Tillizinni; but the other seemed disinclined to go on. “In love as in war,” he began at last, “all means are justified. Remembering the seriousness of the issue, remembering the tremendous effect which the decision one way or the other might produce upon posterity, and remembering, too, that in love as in war, as I say, we come against the elementary passions which are superior to the trivial conventions of modern life----” Tillizinni waited, wonderingly. “My suggestion to the two young men--one, as I have told you, was De Costa, and the other a Mr. William Dixon, of forty-three, Claremont Gardens, S.W.,” he added imposingly and significantly, “my suggestion was, I contend, perfectly pardonable and quite admissible within the rules of war. It was that I had a friend who in a moment of exuberation had struck a policeman.” Tillizinni gasped.