A Damsel in Distress

ged. As the last remnants of sleep left him, he was aware of a vague excitem

f someone in the street below whistling one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite of the fact that the unseen whistler only touche

at last. The

t about this cooling of the emotions. To a man who, like George, has worked year in and year out at the composition of musical comedies, woman comes to lose many of those attractive qualities which ensnare the ordinary male. To George, of late years, it had begun to seem that the salient feature of woman as a sex was her disposition to kick. For five years he had been wandering in a world of women, many of them beautiful, all of them superficially attractive, who had left no other impress on his memory except the vigour and frequency with which they had kicked. Some had kicked about their musical numbers, som

us instincts and a feeling for romance, and cut him off for five years from the exercise of those qualities, and you get an accumulated store o

hed off the spiritual trinitrotoluol which he had been storing up for so long. Up in the air in a million pieces had gone

with more bunkers than any golf course he had ever played on in his life. In the first place, he did not know the girl's name. In the second place, it seemed practically impossible that he would ever see her again.

ie. He had gained much; it now remained for him to push his success to the happy conclusion. The driver of Luck must be replaced by the spoon-or, possibly, the niblick-of Ingenuity. To fail now, to allow this girl to pass o

entrated thought supplied no answer to the question; and it was at this point that the cheery optimism with which he had begun the day left George and gave place to a grey gloom. A dreadful phrase, haunting in its pathos, crept int

fast would at least alleviate this sinking feeling which was unmanni

or. On a mat out

was also in pencil, and strange

Bevan" (

of the heart he loo

signed "The G

MR.

in a cab, and knew that he must have followed us. He did not see me, so I got away all right. I managed splendidly a

o much again for

dne

ur

L IN TH

hree times more during the meal; then, having committed its contents to

re was he convinced that he had met his ideal, and more than ever before was he determined that a triviality like being unaware of her name and address should not keep him from her. It was not as if he had no clue to go upon. He knew that she lived two hours from London and start

ay. But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on u

ary repast at the Piccadilly grill-room, he had brought with him an early edition of the Evening News. And one of the first items which met his eye was the following, embodied in a column on one of the

AND THE

ight have been, had there not come upon the scene old London city's favourite son, Policeman C. 231. 'What means this conduct? Prithee stop!' exclaimed that admirable slop. With which he placed a warning hand upon the brawler's collarband. We simply hate to tell the rest. No subject here for flippant jest. The mere remembrance of the tale has made our ink turn deadly pale. Let us be brief. Some demon sent stark madness on the w

time for food. Rightly indeed had he relied upon his luck. It had stood by him nobly. With this clue, all was over

n, and that the present earl had one son, Percy Wilbraham Marsh, educ. Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and what the book

slowly out of Waterloo Station, George watched London vanish behind him. I