The Rustle of Silk

his house while Lady Feodorowna entertained the resuscitated Souls in the other,—and this young girl of the lower middle class, worshiping at his shrine! He would have followed her for the rest of the afternoon with no other purpose than to study her moods and watch her stir the passers-by like the whir of an aeroplane or the sudden scent of lilac. But the arrival of a train swept a crowd between them and he lost her. He took a ticket to see if she were on one or other of the platforms, returned to the street and searched up and down. She had gone. Before he left, another bill was posted upon the board of the Evening Standard . “Fallaray sees Prime Minister. May resign from cabinet. Uneasiness in Downing Street,” and as he walked away, no longer interested in the psychology of crowds, but with his imagination all eager and alight, the playwright in him had grasped at the germ of a dramatic experiment.—Take the man Fallaray, a true and sensitive patriot, working for no rewards; humanitarian, scholar, untouched by romance, deaf to the rustle of silk—and that girl, woman to the tips of her ears, Eve in every movement of her body—— II “Lola’s late,” said Mrs. Breezy. “She ought to have been home half an hour ago.” Without taking from his eye the magnifying glass through which he was peering into the entrails of a watch, John Breezy gave a fat man’s chuckle. “Don’t you worry about Lola. She’s the original good girl and has more friends among strangers than the pigeons in Kensington Gardens. She’s all right, old dear.” But Mrs. Breezy never gave more than one ear to her husband. She was not satisfied. She left her place behind the glistening counter of the little jewelry shop in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, and went out into the street to see if she could see anything of her ewe lamb,—the one child of her busy and thrifty married life. On a rain-washed board above her head was painted “John Breezy, Watchmaker and Jeweler, Founded in 1760 by Armand de Brézé.” The name had been Bowdlerized as a concession to the careless English ear. On the curb a legless man was seated in a sort of perambulator with double wheels, playing a concertina and accompanying another man with no arms and a