“For her also it must have been a terrible experience. I trust that neither of you was at all — that it was not in your immediate proximity?”

Of the many things Lucy was noticing to-day, not the least remarkable was this: the ghoulish fashion in which respectable people will nibble after blood. George Emerson had kept the subject strangely pure.

“He died by the fountain, I believe,” was her reply.

“And you and your friend — ”

“Were over at the Loggia.”

“That must have saved you much. You have not, of course, seen the disgraceful illustrations which the gutter Press — This man is a public nuisance; he knows that I am a resident perfectly well, and yet he goes on worrying me to buy his vulgar views.”