There, however, a group of idlers followed us about and stood in a ring round us when we stopped to interview a railway official.  The beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—­I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—­was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind.  And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity.  I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable.  Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention.  “Calm and unembarrassed as a fate” she returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my efforts to find Harry.  In the midst of an earnest discussion with the station-master she begged me for a penny to put into an automatic sweetmeat machine, which she had seen a small boy work successfully.  I refused, curtly, and turned to the station-master.  A roar of laughter interrupted me again.  Carlotta, with outstretched hand and pleading eyes, like an organ-grinder’s monkey, had induced the boy to part with the sticky bit of toffee, and was in the act of conveying it to her mouth.

“I’ll call to-morrow morning,” said I hurriedly to the station-master.  “If the gentleman should come meanwhile, tell him to leave his name and address.”

Then I took Carlotta by the arm and, accompanied by my train of satellites, I thrust her into the first hansom-cab I could see.

There was no sign or token of Harry.  No pretty young man was hanging dejectedly about the station.  None had torn his hair before the officials asking for news of a lost female in frowsy black.  There was no Harry.  There was no further need therefore to afford the British public a gratuitous entertainment.

“Drive,” said I to the cabman.  “Drive like the devil.”

“Where to, sir?”

I gasped.  Where should I drive?  I lost my head.

“Go on driving round and round till I tell you to stop.”  The philosophic cabman did not regard me as eccentric, for he whipped up his horse cheerfully.  When we had slid down the steep incline and got free of the precincts of that hateful station, I breathed more freely and collected my wits.  Carlotta sucked her sticky thumbs and wiped them on her dress.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Across Waterloo Bridge,” said I.

“What to do?”

“To dispose of you somehow,” I replied, grimly.  “But how, I haven’t a notion.  There’s a Home for Lost Dogs and a Home for Stray Cats, and a Lost Property Office at Scotland Yard, but as you are neither a dog nor a cat nor an umbrella, these refuges are unavailable.”

The cab reached the Strand.

“East or west, sir?” inquired the driver.

“West,” said I, at random.