Street and gazed up at the window.

For five minutes he stood and watched her, assuming, by looking up
and down the street when anybody passed him by, the attitude of a
person who is waiting for some one.

It is impossible to say whether it is really the woman herself, or
a combination of the woman and the moment, which seizes and drags
a man's attention towards her. In this case it may have been the
combined result of the two. The girl was pretty. In the ray of that
electric light, the soft, childish outline of her face and the pale,
sensuous strands of her hair were probably lent a glamour such as
that given by the footlights. The man, too, was on his way back to
companionless chambers. The lower end of Regent Street may be a far
from lonely spot in which to take up one's abode; but there is nothing
so empty as an empty room, no matter on to what crowded thoroughfare
it may look. Say, then, it was a combination of impulses, the woman
and the moment--the girl pretty and the man oppressed by a sense of
loneliness. Whatever it was, he stood there, without any apparent
intention of moving, and watched her.

She was the last, amongst all those workers who could be seen within
the lighted apertures of the windows, to leave her post. One by one
they performed their weary play of actions, the shutting up of
ledgers, the putting away of papers--out went the lights, and a
moment later dim figures stole out of the darkened doorways into the
drizzling rain, and hurried away into the shadows of the streets.
But she still remained, and the man, with a certain amount of dogged
persistence, continued to watch her movements. Once he took out his
watch, as his impatience became more insistent. Then, with the