Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri.

“Did you hear that?” she said.  “They’d do it too!”

The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, and, by that time, Mr. Travers—­was to draw the animal off the street and into the square.  Sara Lee stuck close by.  So, naturally, did Henri.  And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a soldier.

He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain.

“A kindness,” he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand.  “The only way, mademoiselle.”

Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through an occasional letter to the Times.  He vanished just before the shot, and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls like rational human beings.

But Henri understood.  He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it.  So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to do things rather than to be something or other more or less important.  And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself when Mr. Travers could not.  And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, having composed the little donkey’s quiet figure, straightened up with tears in her eyes.

“It was very dear of you to come out,” she said.  “And—­of course it was the best thing.”

She held out her hand.  The crowd had gone.  Traffic was moving again, racing to make up for five lost precious moments.  The square was dark, that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had not yet taken place.  From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing the sky.  Henri took her hand and bent over it.

“You are very brave, mademoiselle,” he said, and touched her hand with his lips.

The amazing interlude had commenced.

V

Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed.  Mr. Travers sent Sara Lee a note that he was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; and he did indeed make an attempt.  He also requested his wife to ask Sara Lee to tea.

Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went.  She wore a black jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet’s mink furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan.  She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without much expense, and she appeared absurdly young.

She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life.  Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half hour.