At the corner of Francis Street the hansom drew up with a jerk and waited.  A crowd blocked the way.  She leaned forward with a little cry.  What was it?  An accident?  No; a fight.  The great swinging lamps over the door of a public-house threw their yellow light on a ring of brutal faces, men and women, for the most part drunk, trampling, hustling, shouldering each other in their haste to break through to the center.  A girl reeled from the public-house and stood on the edge of the pavement bawling a vile song.  A man lurched up against the side of the hansom; a coarse swollen face flaming with drink was pressed to the glass, close to her own.  As she shrank back in horror, turning her head away from the evil thing, her face sought Stanistreet, the soft fringe of her hair brushed against his cheek.  She had never been so near to him, never, in the abstraction of her terror, so far away.  To-night everything combined to make his own meaning clear to him, sharpened his fierce indignant longing to take her away, out of the hell where these things were possible, to protect her forever from the brutalities of life.

There was a stir; the crowd swayed forward and began to move.  They followed slowly in its wake, hemmed in by the rabble that streamed towards Ridgmount Gardens, to lose itself in the black slums of Bloomsbury.  On the pavement the reeling girl was swept on with the crowd, still singing her hideous song.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson was leaning back now, with her eyes closed, not heeding the ugly pageant.  But the scene came back to her in nightmares afterwards.

As Stanistreet’s hansom turned after leaving her at Ridgmount Gardens, he thought he saw some one remarkably like Tyson standing in the shadow of the railings opposite her door.  He must have seen them; and but for the delay they would probably have overtaken and so missed him.

And Stanistreet kept on saying to himself:  No.  Women do not love like that.  And yet the bare idea of it turned Stanistreet, the cool, the collected, into a trembling maniac.  He could not face the possibility of losing her, of being nothing to her.  But for that he might have been content to go on drifting indefinitely, sure of a sort of visionary eternity, taking no count of time.  He had been happy in his doubt.  Once it had tormented him; he had struggled against it; later, it had become a source of endless interest, like a man’s amusing dialogues with his own soul; now, it was the one solitary refuge of his hope.  He clung to it, he could not let it go.  He staked his all on the folly, the frailty of Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

He had yet to prove it.

Of course she was a little fool; that went without saying.  He had known many women who were fools, and he had survived their folly.  But it seemed that he could not live without this particular little fool.

He called the next day at Ridgmount Gardens.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s manner was a little disconcerting.  He found her at the piano, singing in her pathetic mezzo-soprano a song that used to he a favorite of Tyson’s.  The selection was another freak; it was the first time Louis had heard her sing that song since they left Thorneytoft.