Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her rage burst the flood-gates. She screeched:
"You!... It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to—an' this is 'ow I gits it back?" She gasped. "Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..."
Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice.
"Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other side, can't you hear?"
In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, comfortably propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk of the Convent and the width of its garden and tennis-ground being between them, continued to sleep and snore peacefully and undisturbed.
"Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' you, you try to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! Yah, greedy! Boo! You plate-faced, erring-backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your love-letters an' messages! Wait till I give 'er another o' your screevin'—that's all!"
"Patrol!" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.
She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as she came, to frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside the big gaudy pubs in the Tottenham Court Road, and the Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the recollection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and provoked the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she plucked the weapon of lower-class London from her hat, and jabbed at the pale face viciously, and heard the victim say "Owch!" as he winced, and knew herself, as her Slabberts gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless Boer women who killed men when it was necessary. But, oh! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling of 'aving stuck something into live flesh! Sick and giddy, the heroine shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the magician Brock....