She would stay, keeping on her outdoor things, long enough to hear about the new people. The close sickly sweet air of the room closed oppressively round her heavy garments--Here you are young lady sit here--said Mrs. Bailey piloting her to a chair in front of the fire. There was a stranger sitting at the fireside. Mr. Mendizabble murmured Mrs. Bailey as Miriam sat down. Miriam's affronted eyes took in the figure of a man sitting on the wooden stool crowded in between the mantelpiece and the easy chair occupied by Sissie; a man from a café ... a foreign waiter in his best clothes, sheeny stripy harsh pale grey, a crimson waistcoat showing up the gleam of a gold watch-chain, and crimson cloth slippers; an Italian, a Frenchman, a French-Swiss. He was sitting bent conversationally forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped; quite at home. They had evidently been sitting there all the evening. The air was thick with their intercourse. Miriam received an abrupt nod in answer to her murmur and her stiff bow and followed with resentful curiosity the little foreign tune the man began humming far away in his head. He had not even glanced her way and the tune was his response to Mrs. Bailey's introduction. The remains of a derisive smile seemed to snort from the firmly sweeping white nostrils above his tiny trim bushily upward curving black moustache. It moulded the strong closed lips and shone behind the whole of his curiously square evenly modelled face. The Bailey girls were watching him with shiny flushed cheeks and bright eyes. His skin was white and clean ... mat; like felt ... untouched and untried in the exhausted air of the shabby room. An insolent waiter. He had turned away towards the fire after his nod. From under a firm black-lashed white lid a bright dark eye gazed derision into the flames. Go on Mr. Mendizzable smiled Mrs. Bailey brushing at her skirt with her handkerchief--we are most interested. Hay, madame that is all, he laughed derisively in rich singing swaying tones towards the middle of the hearthrug--I skate from one end of their canal to another, faster than them all. I win their prize. Je m'en fiche-- You skated all the way along the canal.-- Ieeea skate their can_al_. That was Amsterdam. I do many things there. I edit their newspaper. I conduct a café. Mts. You _have_ had some adventures-- That was not adventures in Amsterdam mon dieu! He swayed drumming from foot to foot in time to his shouts. Had he really beaten those wonderful skaters? Perhaps he had not. She glanced at his brow calm, firm, dead white under the soft crisply ridged black hair. Perhaps he was Dutch; and that was why he looked common and also refined. 2