"And what is your claim, then, to go there?" Macleod asked.

"Oh," said the young lieutenant, laughing at the home-thrust, "I am only
admitted on sufferance, as a friend of Colonel Ross. She never asked
_me_ to put my name in her autograph-book. But I have done a bit of the
jackal for her once or twice, when I happened to be on leave; and she
has sent me with people to her box at Covent Garden when she couldn't go
herself."

"And how am I to propitiate her? What am I to do?"

"She will soon let you know how you strike her. Either she will pet you,
or she will snuff you out like winking. I don't know a woman who has a
blanker stare, when she likes."

This idle conversation was suddenly interrupted. At the same moment both
young men experienced a sinking sensation, as if the earth had been cut
away from beneath their feet; then there was a crash, and they were
violently thrown against each other; then they vaguely knew that the
cab, heeling over, was being jolted along the street by a runaway horse.
Fortunately, the horse could not run very fast, for the axle-tree,
deprived of its wheel, was tearing at the road; but, all the same, the
occupants of the cab thought they might as well get out, and so they
tried to force open the two small panels of the door in front of them.
But the concussion had so jammed these together that, shove at them as
they might, they would not yield. At this juncture, Macleod, who was not
accustomed to hansom cabs, and did not at all like this first experience
of them, determined to get out somehow; and so he raised himself a bit,
so as to get his back firm against the back of the vehicle; he pulled up