cause warmly, gave him the latter at once.  The former she set to work to instil into him.  She waylaid him at odd corners in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and sought to inspire him with the true Balkan spirit.  She even supplied him with an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp.  At last, the poor craven, finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the mistress of the boarding-house protection against his champion.  Mrs. Considine, called into consultation, was informed that Mrs. Prescott must either cease from instigating the waiters to commit murder or find other quarters.  Liosha curled a contemptuous lip.

“If you think I’m going to have anything more to do with the little skunk, you’re mistaken.”

And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room, approached her with the tray, she waved him off.

“See here,” she said calmly, “just you keep out of my way or I might tread on you.”

Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the genteel assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole difficulty by bolting from the house, never to return.

When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter, Liosha shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

“I guess,” she said, “if a man loves a woman strongly enough to cry for her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted in, without being told.”

“But you don’t seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to take the life of a human being,” said Barbara.

“I can understand how you feel,” Liosha admitted.  “But I don’t feel about it the same as you.  I’ve been brought up different.”

“You see, my dear Barbara,” I interposed judicially, “her father made his living by slaughter before she was born.  When he finished with the pigs he took on humans who displeased him.”

“And they were worse than the pigs,” said Liosha.

Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she extracted a promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a knife into anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so doing.

But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace, Liosha led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house.  If she now and then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits and free expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them a chronic topic of conversation.  A large though somewhat scornful generosity also established her in their esteem.  She would lend or give anything she possessed.  When one of the forlorn and woollen-shawled old maids fell ill, she sat up of nights with her, and in spite of her ignorance of nursing, which was as vast as that of a rhinoceros, magnetised the fragile lady into well-being.  I think she was fairly happy.  If London had been situated amid gorges and crags and ravines and granite cliffs she would have been completely so.  She yearned for mountains.  Mrs. Considine to satisfy this nostalgia took her for a week’s trip to the English Lakes.  She returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for unimportant undulations, and declaring her preference for London.  So in London she remained.