She gave Nicholas Pavlovitch only the bald outline of the beastly happening. Blackmailer, money. He blushed furiously. Often she had seen him blush, but never as now. He was like a child who had just been smacked and knows he has not deserved it. He couldn’t, he said, bear the indecency, the shame, of it ... that, through loving him, she should have to endure this awful thing. There was only one thing to do. She must “cut him out,” that’s all! And how funnily tragic that slang sounded in his twisted Russian pronunciation. She laughed at that. Not much, but just enough. “We do not,” she said, “take our tragedies so tragically. But scratch a Russian and you find a baby....” She kissed him. “It is easier than that,” she explained. “You must move, dear. For weeks you have been complaining of the lighting in this studio--and now you have every excuse for taking steps about leaving it. Long steps are preferable, Nicholas. From Hampstead to Chelsea, in fact....” Shove-off took steps at once, and these lead him to a little studio in a little street off the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was a little street like another, with a pillar-box at one end and the noise of busses at the other. Near the pillar-box was a lamp-post. And one autumn evening, as Mrs. Avalon walked from her lover’s studio into Cheyne Walk, she saw a man leaning against the lamp-post, and under a soft dilapidated hat she saw the shape of a lean face and a broken nose. He was motionless, indifferent, and he was not looking at her but at the wind that blew the leaves about the little street. Her heart jumped, and then was as still as a cut flower. “So!” she whispered bitterly. “Blackmailers are like history, then!” The vile person made the courteous gesture. “Mr. Beerbohm has it,” the vile person said gravely, “that it is not history that repeats itself but historians who repeat one another. A charming writer, don’t you think?” “Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Avalon very miserably, “I thought you were vile! But I am disappointed in you. I actually thought you would leave me alone. You are even viler than I thought, you who call yourself the cavalier of the streets!” “Perhaps,” murmured the shabby young man. “Perhaps. It seems always to have been my fate to find out the indecencies of decent people, and so, of course, decent people do not take a very liberal view of me. You find me this evening, Mrs. Avalon, in a conversational vein.” There was a ghastly sort of subtlety in his neglect to mention why he was there, a thin, rakish hawk by the lamp-post. Impotent, she loathed him. And she passed him resolutely, with a very proud face, one step, two, three.... And then his voice fell harshly on her back: “You are the kind of woman men dream about in lonely moments. My life is made of lonely moments, and I think this is the loneliest of all. Go away quickly, Fay Avalon!” Bewilderment wheeled her round. “_What_ did you say?” she cried.