"I--I'd forgotten!" stammered he.

It was an awful sight. The girl was hungry, ravenously hungry, and he
had been chatting to her and talking about kisses when she was starving!

There was again a faint spot of color in her cheeks, as she turned her
back to him and crouched on the hearth with the food.

"Don't look at me," she said, half laughing, half ashamed. "I suppose
you've never been without food for two days!"

Max could not at first answer. He sat in one of the wooden chairs, with
his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, calling himself,
mentally, all sorts of things for his idiotic forgetfulness.

"And to think," said he, at last, in a hoarse and not over-steady-voice,
"that I dared to compare myself to a knight-errant!"

The biscuits were disappearing rapidly. Presently she turned and let him
see her face again.

"Perhaps," suggested she, still with her mouth full, "as you say, one
didn't hear quite all about those gentlemen. Perhaps they forgot things
sometimes. And perhaps," she added, with a most gracious change to
gratitude and kindness, "they weren't half so sorry when they forgot as
you are."

Max listened in fresh amazement. Where on earth had this child of the
slums, in the cheap-stuff frock and clumsy shoes, got her education, her
refinement? Her talk was not so very different from that of the West-End