Now I was, really floored! Would wonders never cease? Far from being discomfited and hugely embarrassed by my violation of her, this delectable brunette was actually begging me to repeat the episode-unless my ears had played me a bad trick.

“Am I to understand, Miss Molly,” I demanded somewhat incredulously, “that you are offering yourself to me this afternoon? But what about your friend, Miss Denton? How do you expect us to manage a clandestine amour when she is here in my apartment? Will she not tell your mother and blemish your reputation, perhaps even destroy your hopes for a profitable union with this estimable diplomat?”

“I-I want you to do the same thing to her,” came the amazing and unexpected answer. “I want you to capture us both and-and-and to f-force us just as you did Mummy and me that other afternoon. Will you, Mr. Jack?”

“But, my dear girl,” I exclaimed, taken as you may well suspect most emphatically aback by this astonishing declaration, “what motive could I possibly have to proceed against Miss Denton, whom I have only just met and who has certainly never affronted me?”

Again Molly Bashe blushed to the roots of her dark hair and lowered her eyes. Her magnificent young bosom rose and fell with a turbulence I could only ascribe to the singularity of her proposal and to the emotional enervation it must have caused her. “Well, you see, Mr. Jack,” she stammeringly explained, “Julia is my cousin, and she has just been most terribly jilted. She was betrothed to a young officer in the Grenadiers, and she expected to be married next month, but the dreadful rascal was sent along with his regiment to Gibraltar and only yesterday she received a letter from him saying that he was secretly engaged to a very beautiful Moroccan girl whom he expects to marry when he gets leave in his new post.”