"Certainly. Mother doesn't approve of girls riding on the tops of 'buses, and says it's fast. Therefore I'd much rather walk, for at this hour half London seems to be going from Piccadilly Circus to Hammersmith. I go right across, past the Serpentine, through Kensington Gardens to the Broad Walk, and out by the small gate next the _Palace Hotel_," she added, with a sweep of her gloved hand. Her eyes were lovely. As she stood there in the fading sunlight she seemed the fairest vision I had ever seen. I stood spell-bound by her marvellous beauty. "And may I not act as your escort on your walk to-day?" I asked. "Certainly. I have no objection," she answered with graceful dignity, therefore I turned and walked beside her, carrying her music. We took the road, which leads straight away to the Magazine, and crosses the Serpentine beyond. There in the yellow glow of the October sunset I lounged at her side and drank my fill of her loveliness. Surely, I thought, there could be no more beautiful woman in all the world. The Colonel's strange warning recurred to me, but I laughed it to scorn. As we passed beneath the rustling trees the sun's last rays lit up her beautiful face with a light that seemed ethereal and tipped her hair until there seemed a golden halo about her. I was no lovesick youth, be it remembered, but a man who had had a bitter experience of the world and its suffering. Yet at that hour I was fascinated by the grace of her superb carriage, the suppleness of her figure, the charm of her sweet smile, and the soft music of her voice as she chatted to me. She told me of her love for music; and from the character of the pieces which formed her studies I knew that she must be a musician of a no mean order. The operatic melody which she had sung at the Colonel's was, she declared, a mere trifle. We discussed the works of Rossini and Massent, of Wagner and Mendelssohn, and of Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni, Perosi, and such latter-day composers. I had always prided myself that I knew something of music, but her knowledge was far deeper than mine. And so we gossiped on, crossing the Park and entering Kensington Gardens--those beautiful pleasure grounds that always seem so neglected by the majority of Londoners--while the sun sank and disappeared in its blood-red afterglow. She spoke of her life abroad, declaring that she loved London and was always pleased to return to its wild, turbulent life. She had spent some time in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, but no one was half as interesting, she declared, as London. "But you are not a Londoner, are you?" I asked. "No, not exactly," she responded, "although I've lived here such a long time that I've become almost a Cockney. Are you a Londoner?" "No," I answered; "I'm a countryman, born and bred." "I heard the Colonel remark that other night that you had been afflicted by blindness for some time. Is that so?" I responded in the affirmative.