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A week afterwards I had a call from Mr. Everard Brookes. He began to talk about his wife—he still called her his wife. The man struck me as being more than half a lunatic. He told me that he had more than once thought of going into mourning. The very notion! I thought of what her feelings would have been if she had seen him in widower's weeds. He said that he felt that in the first flush of his agitation he had misjudged her; he was sure that she had cared for him; he had had proofs of it. I wonder what they were. He was nearly convinced that she had been the victim of one of those tragedies of which one reads in the newspapers; she might have been run over by a motor-bus; he had a morbid feeling that he himself would one day be run over by a vehicle of that description. Something had happened to her, he believed; one day it would be made known what it was.

I hoped that it never would, for his sake. He was one of those men who—because nothing ever has happened to them—like to think that something has happened to them at last—something wonderful, altogether out of the common way; that they have been the victim of some supreme tragedy. I doubt if he would have made much of a husband, anyhow. He was actually happy under the delusion that some strange, mysterious fate had in some altogether incomprehensible way robbed him of what might have been his life's bright star. His existence might have been so blissful had Destiny only stayed its hand. It is my belief that he endeavoured to make this clear to everybody he met after five minutes' acquaintance; so that, if he lost his wife before she was really his, at least he had an object in life.

The next morning I met William B. Stebbings, the son of Ebenezer's Grey-Blue Pills, and, as soon as he had made up his mind who I was, the very first words he said to me were:—

"I say, Miss Lee, I'm going to be married—yes, I am; and I hope to see you there; you must have a card. It's on Tuesday week." Then, though we were out in the open street, he closed his left eye and winked. "Have you ever heard anything of Miss Tracy? She was a dandy of a girl, she was; and, between ourselves, I believe that she didn't object to me. If it hadn't been for that little upset, matters between us might have gone farther than—— Well, strictly between ourselves, I don't mind telling you that she told me herself that she would like to be my wife; she meant it, too. She was fond of me, that girl was. Pity she made such a mistake."

I did not know to which mistake he alluded, and I did not ask him. I did not want to know. He was an extremely plain, clumsily-built, stupid young man; and I was half inclined to wish that she had married him. Where women are concerned, men are the most amazing things. What all those men, of different ages, different tastes, different altogether, saw in her was beyond my comprehension. The proof that she had a fatal fascination for the male animal came to me in still stranger shape only a few days later.

I was standing in one of the Tube stations, when a decently-dressed young man came up to me and took his cap off.

"Excuse me, but aren't you Miss Lee? I don't suppose you know who I am, but I remember you because of Miss Balfour."

"Miss who?" I asked. I was quite certain I had never seen him before; he was almost a gentleman and quite nice-looking, about twenty-three or four.

"Miss Balfour spoke to you in Bond Street, now rather more than a fortnight since. You were passing when she came out of a shop and spoke to you, and then she got into the motor-car. I was the chauffeur. She told me afterwards who you were."

"So she calls herself Miss Balfour now, does she?" A light was beginning to dawn on me. "I shall be very much obliged if you can tell me where Miss Balfour is to be found at the present moment."

He pulled rather a long face.

"I wish I could; that is what I hoped you would be able to tell me."

"No one is less likely to be able to tell you about the movements of the woman who, according to you, now calls herself Miss Balfour than I am. Are you no longer in her employ?"

He shifted his cap a little to one side and scratched his head. I thought what a rueful-looking object he was all at once.

"Well, it's rather a long story. It's like this." He paused, as if to try back to the beginning. "I wasn't exactly in her employ; the fact is, an uncle of mine left me a legacy, and I laid it out in buying a motor-car, meaning to hire it out to people who wanted one. It's a first-rate car, and I wanted to get at people of better class. Miss Balfour hired it—first by the day, then by the week, and then by the month. We used to go off together for tours in the country, and"—he began to look sheepish—"she made herself very pleasant to me. Of course, she paid my expenses, and nothing would suit her but that we should take our meals together—late