No—the loveliest. When I look back and review the beautiful women I have known, blonde and dark slim and buxom, white and brown, hundreds of the creatures—still, I doubt if there was one to touch her. She was standing with one foot on the step, her hands holding back the skirts of her red satin gown, bending forward to display a splendid white bosom on which sparkled a row of brilliants matching the string in her jet black hair. Dark blue eyes, very large, stared down at me, and her mouth, which was not wide but very full and red, opened in a little gasp.

“God save me!” exclaims she. “A man! What the devil are you doing, sir?”

It wasn’t the kind of greeting you commonly heard from ladies in the young Queen’s day, I may tell you. Any other would have screamed and swooned. Thinking quickly, I decided that for once truth would answer best.

“I’m hiding,” says I.

“I can see that,” says she smartly. She had a most lovely Irish lilt to her voice. “Who from, and why in my carriage, if you please?”

Before I could answer, a man loomed up at her elbow, and at sight of me he let out a foreign oath and started forward as though to protect her.

“Please, please, I mean no harm,” I said urgently. “I’m being pursued…the police…no, I’m not a criminal, I assure you. I was in a club that was raided.”

The man just stared at me, but the woman showed her teeth in a delightful smile and then threw her head back, chuckling. I smiled as ingratiatingly as I could, but for all the effect my charm had on her companion I might as well have been Quasimodo.

“Step out at once.” snaps he, in a cold clipped voice. “At once, do you hear?”

I conceived an instant dislike for him. It was not only his manner and his words but the look of him. He was big, as big as I was, slim-hipped and broad-shouldered, but he was also damned handsome. He had bright grey eyes and one of those clean-cut faces beneath fair hair that make you think of moral Norse gods, too splendid altogether to be in the company of the beauty beside him.

I started to say something, but he barked at me again, and then the women came to my aid.

“Oh, let him be, Otto,” says she. “Can’t you see he’s a gentleman?”

I would have thanked her gratefully, but at that moment there were heavy feet on the pavement, and a grave voice inquiring if the gentleman had seen anyone running through the square. The peelers were on the scent again, and this time I was cornered.

But before I could move or speak the lady had seated herself in the coach and hissed:

“Get up off the floor, you booby!”