The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the sunny street.  She glided, very clear, small, and defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came shining down toward me.  My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into composition—­the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street.  The bright sky fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of a postman’s cart.  She was gliding toward me, growing and growing into the central figure.  She descended and stood close to me.

“You?” I said.  “What blessed chance brought you here?”

“Oh, I am your aunt’s companion,” she answered, “her niece, you know.”

“Then you must be a cousin,” I said.

“No; sister,” she corrected, “I assure you it’s sister.  Ask anyone—­ask your aunt.”  I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.

“But really, you know,” I said.  She was smiling, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her body.

“It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very,” I answered, “but even at that, I don’t see—.  And I’m not phenomenally dense.”

“Not phenomenally,” she answered.

“Considering that I’m not a—­not a Dimensionist,” I bantered.  “But you have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?”

“Really,” she answered, “she doesn’t know any better.  She believes in me immensely.  I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one.  And we shake our heads together over you.”  My bewilderment was infinite, but it stopped short of being unpleasant.

“Might I call on my aunt?” I asked.  “It wouldn’t interfere—­”

“Oh, it wouldn’t interfere,” she said, “but we leave for Paris to-morrow.  We are very busy.  We—­that is, my aunt; I am too young and too, too discreet—­have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the regimes in Europe.  You have no idea how Legitimate we are.”

“I don’t understand in the least,” I said; “not in the least.”

“Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand,” she answered, “and you won’t do that.  I tell you plainly that I find my account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them.  Everywhere.  You will see.”

She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass down my spine, very distinctly.  I was thinking what she might do if ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way—­as her husband, for example.

“I wish you would talk sense—­for one blessed minute,” I said; “I want to get things a little settled in my mind.”

“Oh, I’ll talk sense,” she said, “by the hour, but you won’t listen.  Take your friend, Churchill, now.  He’s the man that we’re going to bring down.  I mentioned it to you, and so....”