little line of white teeth as she did so.  What the veteran’s next move might have been no one can tell, for the lady solved the problem by disappearing, and this time permanently.  He was very well satisfied, however, and chuckled much to himself while arraying himself in his long frock coat and immaculate collar before setting out for the club.  He had been a sly old dog in his day, and had followed Venus almost as much as he had Mars during his chequered career.

All day the recollection of this little episode haunted him.  So much pre-occupied was he at the club that he actually played out the thirteenth trump upon his partner’s long suit and so sacrificed the game—­being the first and only time that he was ever known to throw away a point.  He told Von Baumser all about it when he came back.

“She’s a demned foine-looking woman, whoever she may be,” he remarked, at they sat together before turning in.  “Be George! she’s the foinest woman I’ve seen for a long time.”

“She’s a window,” said the German.

“A what?”

“A window—­the window of an engineer.”

“Is it a widow you mane?  What d’ye know about her?  What’s her name, and where does she come from?”

“I have heard from the slavey that a win—­a widow lives over dere in those rooms.  She boards mit Madame Morrison, and that window belongs to her privacy zimmer—­dat is, chamber.  As to her name, I have not heard it, or else I disremember it.”

“Ged!” said the major, “she’d eyes that looked right through ye, and a figure like Juno.”

“She’s vierzig if she’s a day—­dat is, forty,” Von Baumser remarked.

“Well, if she is, me boy, a woman of forty is just in the proime o’ loife.  If you’d seen her at the window, she would have taken ye by storm.  She stands like this, and she looks up like this, and then down in this way.”  The major pursed up his warlike features into what he imagined to be an innocent and captivating expression.  Then she looks across and sees me, and down go the lids of her eyes, like the shutting off of a bull’s-eye lantern.  Then she blushed and stole just one more glance at me round the corner of the curtain.  She had two peeps, the divil a doubt of it.”

“Dat is very good,” the German said encouragingly.

“Ah, me boy, twinty years ago, when I was forty inches round the chest and thirty-three round the waist, I was worth looking at twice.  Bedad, when a man gets ould and lonely he sees what a fool he was not to make better use of his time when he’d the chance.”

“Mein Gott!” cried Von Baumser.  “You don’t mean to say that you would marry suppose you had the chance?”

“I don’t know,” the major answered reflectively.