The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh: 

“Go to such an one, Lady Muriel.  Who shall turn aside from virtue in distress?  Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the brutality — shall we call it — to resist that spectacle.”

The woman rose.  Her face was now flushed and angry.

“I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel, Hecklemeir,” she said.  “I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the whole story of your secret traffic.”

The man continued to smile.

“Alas, my Lady,” he replied, “we are coupled together.  Scotland Yard would hardly separate us . . . . you could scarcely manage to drown me and, keep afloat yourself.  Dismiss the notion; it is from the pit.”

There was no virtue in her threat as the woman knew.  Already her mind was on the way that Hecklemeir had ironically suggested — an elderly relative, with no children, from whom one might borrow, — she valued the ramifications of her family, running out to the remote, withered branches of that noble tree.  She appraised the individuals and rejected them.

Finally her searching paused.

There was her father’s brother who had gone in for science — deciding against the army and the church — Professor Bramwell Winton, the biologist.  He lived somewhere toward Covent Garden.

She had not thought of him for years.  Occasionally his name appeared in some note issued by the museum, or a college at Oxford.

For almost four years she had been relieved of this thought about one’s family.  The one “over the water” for whom Hecklemeir had stolen the Scottish toast to designate, had paid lavishly for what she could find out.

She had been richly, for these four years, in funds.

The habit was established of dipping her hand into the dish.  And now to find the dish empty appalled her.  She could not believe that it was empty.  She had come again, and again to this apartment above the shops in Regent Street, selected for its safety of ingress; a modiste and a hairdresser on either side of a narrow flight of steps.

A carriage could stop here; one could be seen here.

Even on the right, above, at the landing of the flight of steps Nance Coleen altered evening gowns with the skill of one altering the plumage of the angels.  It must have cost the one “over the water” a pretty penny to keep this whole establishment running through four years of war.

She spoke finally.

“Have you a directory of London, Hecklemeir?”

The man had been watching her closely.

“If it is Scotland Yard, my Lady,” he said, “you will not require a direction.  I can give you the address.  It is on the Embankment, near . . . "

“Don’t be a fool, Hecklemeir,” she interrupted, and taking the book from his hands, she whipped through the pages, got the address she sought, and went out onto the narrow landing and down the steps into Regent Street: