“Well, you might.  You have to take my generosity on trust, but I have proof of yours.”

“You’re an original sort of girl,” said Waymark, throwing away the end of his cigar.  “Do you talk to everybody in this way?”

“Pooh, of course not.  I shouldn’t be worth much if I couldn’t suit my conversation to the man I want to make a fool of.  Would you rather have me talk in the usual way?  Shall I say—­”

“I had rather not.”

“Well, I knew that.”

“And how?”

“Well, you don’t wear a veil, if I do.”

“You can read faces?”

“A little, I flatter myself.  Can you?”

“Give me a chance of trying.”

She raised her veil, and he inspected her for some moments, then looked away.

“Excellently well, if God did all,” he observed, with a smile.

“That’s out of a play,” she replied quickly.  “I heard it a little time ago, but I forget the answer.  I’d have given anything to be able to cap you!  Then you’d have put me down for a clever woman, and I should have lived on the reputation henceforth and for ever.  But it’s all my own, indeed; I’m not afraid of crying.”

“Do you ever cry?  I can’t easily imagine it.”

“Oh yes, sometimes,” she answered, sighing, and at the same time lowering her veil again.  “But you haven’t read my face for me.”

“It’s a face I’m sorry to have seen.”

“Why?” she asked, holding her hands clasped before her, the palms turned outwards.

“I shall think of it often after tonight, and imagine it with all its freshness gone, and marks of suffering and degradation upon it.”

“Suffering, perhaps; degradation, no.  Why should I be degraded?”

“You can’t help yourself.  The life you have chosen brings its inevitable consequences.”

“Chosen!” she repeated, with an indignant face.  “How do you know I had any choice in the matter?  You have no right to speak contemptuously, like that.”

“Perhaps not.  Certainly not.  I should have said—­the life you are evidently leading.”

“Well, I don’t know that it makes so much difference.  I suppose everybody has a choice at all events between life and death, and you mean that I ought to have killed myself rather than come to this.  That’s my own business, however, and—­”

A man had just passed behind them, and, catching the sound of the girl’s voice, had turned suddenly to look at her.  She, at the same moment, looked towards him, and stopped all at once in her speech.

“Are you walking up Regent Street?” she asked Waymark, in quite a different voice.  “Give me your arm, will you?”

Waymark complied, and they walked together in the direction she suggested.

“What is the matter with you?” he asked.  “Why are you trembling?”

“Don’t look round.  It’s that fellow behind us; I know he is following.”