what is called a happy thought.  I resolved to ask the first girl of my acquaintance I met in my walk.  Instantly my spirits rose like a thermometer in a Turkish bath.  The clouds of irresolution rolled away, and the touch of adventure made my walk joyous again.  I peered eagerly into every female face I met, but it was not till I approached the market-place that I knew my fate.  Then, turning a corner, I came suddenly and violently face to face with Froeken Jensen.”

He paused and relit his cigarette, and the maddening music of brass instruments and brazen creatures, which his story had shut out, crashed again upon my ears.  “I reckon if you were telling this, you’d stop here,” he said, “and put down ‘to be continued in our next.’” There seemed a trace of huskiness in his flippant tones, as if he were trying to keep under some genuine emotion.

“Never you mind,” I returned, smiling.  “You’re not a writer, anyhow, so just keep straight on.”

“Well, Froeken Jensen was absolutely the ugliest girl I have seen in all my globe-trottings....  On second thoughts, that is the place to stop, isn’t it?”

“Not at all; it’s only in long novels one stops for refreshment.  So go ahead, and—­I say—­do cut your interruptions a la Fielding and Thackeray. C’est vieux jeu.”

“All right, don’t get mad.  Froeken Jensen had the most irregular and ungainly features that ever crippled a woman’s career; her nose was—­But no!  I won’t describe her, poor girl.  She was about twenty-six years old, but one of those girls whose years no one counts, who are old maids at seventeen.  Well, you can fancy what a fix I was in.  It was no good pretending to myself that I hadn’t seen her, for we nearly bowled each other over—­she was coming along quick trot with a basket on her arm—­and it seemed kind of shuffling to back out of my promise to her, though she didn’t know anything about it.  It was like betting with yourself and wanting to cheat yourself when you lost.  I felt I should never trust myself again, if I turned welsher—­that’s the word, isn’t it?”

“It’s like Jephtha,” I said.  “He swore, you know, he would sacrifice the first creature that he saw on his triumphant return from the wars, and his daughter came out and had to be sacrificed.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” he said, with a grimace.  “But I’m not up in the classics, so the comparison didn’t strike me.  But what did strike me, after the first moment of annoyance, was the humour of the situation.  I turned and walked beside her—­under cover of an elaborate apology for my dashing behaviour.  She seemed quite concerned at my regret, and insisted that it was she that had dashed—­it was her marketing-day, and she was late.  You must know she kept a boarding-house for art and university students, and it was there that I had made her acquaintance, when I went to dine once or twice with a studio chum who was quartered there.  I had never exchanged