"Perhaps not! But I was so surprised, I could not understand it."
"May I remind you that I am completely in the dark as to this little adventure," Lord St. Maurice remarked pleasantly. "What was it, Lumley?"
"A very simple affair after all. I was in Piccadilly, and Miss Briscoe here was coming out of some milliner's shop and crossing the pavement to her carriage."
"Cab!" she interrupted.
"Cab, then. Well, it was late in the afternoon, and two drunken little cads tried to speak to her. Naturally, as I was the nearest decent person, I interfered and assisted Miss Briscoe into her cab. That I was passing was a piece of good fortune for which I have always been thankful."
"Lord Lumley does not add that his interference consisted in knocking one man down and holding the other until he almost choked with one hand, while he helped me into the cab with the other."
"I only shook him a little," he laughed, giving his mother his arm, for the butler had announced dinner while they had been talking. "If I had been he I would rather have had the shaking than the look Miss Briscoe flashed at him."
"I detest being touched," she said coldly, "especially by a stranger."
"How did the affair end?" Lord St. Maurice asked, sipping his soup. "I hope you got them locked up, Lumley."
"Why, the termination of the affair was the part on which I do really congratulate myself," he answered. "A policeman came up at once, but before I could give them in charge—in which case I should, of course, have been called upon to prosecute and got generally mixed up in the affair—one of the fellows began thumping the policeman; so of course he collared them and marched them off. I slipped away, and I noticed the next morning that they got pretty heavily fined for assaulting a policeman in the execution of his duty."