“John Wingate!”

“Yes?”

“Don’t try to be cynical.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” she persisted.  “There isn’t a man breathing who has a more wonderful capacity for caring than you.  You hide your feelings from most people.  Are you very angry with me for having guessed?  I have, you know.”

Wingate paused in the act of lighting a cigarette.

“What’s that?”

“I think I have a sort of second sight in such matters, especially as regards people in whom I am interested,” Sarah continued, “and if there is one woman in the world whom I really adore, and for whom I am heartily sorry, it is Josephine Dredlinton.”

“She has a rotten time,” was Wingate’s terse comment.

“Very few people know how rotten,” Sarah went on.  “She has lost nearly all her own relations in the war, her husband has spent the greater part of her fortune, flaunted his affairs with various actresses in the face of all London, shilly-shallied through the war as a recruiting officer, or on any odd job that kept him safely at home, and now he openly associates with a little company of men in the City who are out to make money any old way they can get hold of it.”

“Lord Dredlinton is a bad lot,” Wingate acquiesced.

“And Josephine is an angel,” Sarah declared warmly.  “If I were a man—­”

“Well, you’re not,” he interrupted.

“If I were a man,” she went on, laying her hand upon his, “I wouldn’t let Josephine live out these best days of her life in sorrow.  I wouldn’t have her insulted and peered at, every hour of her life.  I wouldn’t see her living in torture, when all the time she has such a wonderful capacity for life and love.  Do you know what I’d do, Mr. Wingate?”

“What would you do?” he asked.

“I’d take her away!  I wouldn’t care about anybody else or anything.  If the world didn’t approve, I’d make a little world of my own and put her in it.  You’re quite strong enough.”

He looked through the walls of the room, for a minute.

“Yes, I am strong enough,” he agreed, “but is she?”

“Why do you doubt her?” Sarah demanded.  “What has she in her present life to lose, compared with what she gains from you—­what she wants more than anything else in the world—­love?”

He made no answer.  The girl’s words had thrilled him.  Then the door swung open and Jimmy appeared, very pink and white, very immaculate, and looking rather more helpless than usual.

“I say, Sarah,” he exclaimed, “it’s no use!  There’s a most infernal block down in the courtyard.  Chap wanted me to push the taxi out into the street.  It’s cost me all the loose change I’ve got to stop his sending for a policeman.  We’ll have to do a scoot.”

Sarah sighed as her host arranged her cloak around her.

“Sorry we couldn’t have stayed a little longer,” she said.  “Mr. Wingate was just getting most interesting.”