Better to dismiss dreams and return to the practical side of life by buying the evening papers from the shabby individual beside him, who had just thrust an early edition in his face.  After all notices are notices, even when the heart is aching.  George felt in his pocket for the necessary money, found emptiness, and remembered that he had left all his ready funds at his hotel.  It was just one of the things he might have expected on a day like this.

The man with the papers had the air of one whose business is conducted on purely cash principles.  There was only one thing to be done, return to the hotel, retrieve his money, and try to forget the weight of the world and its cares in lunch.  And from the hotel he could despatch the two or three cables which he wanted to send to New York.

The girl in brown was quite close now, and George was enabled to get a clearer glimpse of her.  She more than fulfilled the promise she had given at a distance.  Had she been constructed to his own specifications, she would not have been more acceptable in George’s sight.  And now she was going out of his life for ever.  With an overwhelming sense of pathos, for there is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met, George hailed a taxicab which crawled at the side of the road; and, with all the refrains of all the sentimental song hits he had ever composed ringing in his ears, he got in and passed away.

“A rotten world,” he mused, as the cab, after proceeding a couple of yards, came to a standstill in a block of the traffic.  “A dull, flat bore of a world, in which nothing happens or ever will happen.  Even when you take a cab it just sticks and doesn’t move.”

At this point the door of the cab opened, and the girl in brown jumped in.

“I’m so sorry,” she said breathlessly, “but would you mind hiding me, please.”

CHAPTER 3.

George hid her.  He did it, too, without wasting precious time by asking questions.  In a situation which might well have thrown the quickest-witted of men off his balance, he acted with promptitude, intelligence and despatch.  The fact is, George had for years been an assiduous golfer; and there is no finer school for teaching concentration and a strict attention to the matter in hand.  Few crises, however unexpected, have the power to disturb a man who has so conquered the weakness of the flesh as to have trained himself to bend his left knee, raise his left heel, swing his arms well out from the body, twist himself into the shape of a corkscrew and use the muscle of the wrist, at the same time keeping his head still and his eye on the ball.  It is estimated that there are twenty-three important points to be borne in mind simultaneously while making a drive at golf; and to the man who has mastered the art of remembering them all the task of hiding girls in taxicabs is mere child’s play.  To pull down the blinds on the side of the vehicle nearest the kerb was with George the work of a moment.  Then he leaned out of the centre window in such a manner as completely to screen the interior of the cab from public view.