“And you decline to say anything about the seventy pounds?” said Doodles, resolving that his courage should not desert him.

Whereupon the divine Sophie laughed.  “Ha, ha, ha!  I see you have not got on any gloves, Captain Booddle.”

“Gloves; no.  I don’t wear gloves.”

“Nor your uncle with the leetle property in Warwickshire?  Captain Clavering, he wears a glove.  He is a handy man.”  Doodles stared at her, understanding nothing of this.  “Perhaps it is in your waistcoat pocket,” and she approached him fearlessly, as though she were about to deprive him of his watch.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said he, retreating.

“Ah, you are not a handy man, like my friend the other captain, so you had better go away.  Yes; you had better go to Warwickshire.  In Warwickshire, I suppose, they make ready for your Michaelmas dinners.  You have four months to get fat.  Suppose you go away and get fat.”

Doodles understood nothing of her sarcasm, but began to perceive that he might as well take his departure.  The woman was probably a lunatic, and his friend Archie had no doubt been grossly deceived when he was sent to her for assistance.  He had some faint idea that the seventy pounds might be recovered from such a madwoman, but in the recovery his friend would be exposed, and he saw that the money must be abandoned.  At any rate he had not been soft enough to dispose of any more treasure.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, very curtly.

“Good morning to you, Captain Booddle.  Are you coming again another day?”

“Not that I know of, ma’am.”

“You are very welcome to stay away.  I like your friend the better.  Tell him to come and be handy with his glove.  As for you—­suppose you go to the leetle property.”

Then Captain Boodle went, and, as soon as he had made his way out into the open street, stood still and looked around him, that by the aspect of things familiar to his eyes he might be made certain that he was in a world with which he was conversant.  While in that room with the spy he had ceased to remember that he was in London—­his own London, within a mile of his club, within a mile of Tattersall’s.  He had been, as it were, removed to some strange world in which the tact, and courage, and acuteness natural to him had not been of avail to him.  Madam Gordeloup had opened a new world to him—­a new world of which he desired to make no further experience.  Gradually he began to understand why he had been desired to prepare himself for Michaelmas eating.  Gradually some idea about Archie’s glove glimmered across his brain.  A wonderful woman certainly was the Russian spy—­a phenomenon which in future years he might perhaps be glad to remember that he had seen in the flesh.  The first race-horse which he might ever own and name himself, he would certainly call the Russian Spy.  In the meantime, as he slowly walked across Berkeley Square, he acknowledged to