When love dawns; or, Dark Magdalen

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WHEN LOVE DAWNS

OR,

DARK MAGDALEN

ADELAIDE STIRLING

AUTHOR OF

“Nerine’s Second Choice,” “The Purple Mask,”
“Lover or Husband?” etc.

NEW YORK
STREET & SMITH, Publishers
79-89 Seventh Avenue

[Pg 2]

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“Why didn’t you tell me?” The girl had her back turned on the extravagant, luxurious room and its one other occupant. Her voice was full of anger and she stared out of the window as though she had not patience to meet the other woman’s eyes.

“What good would it have done?” Mrs. Arden lay stretched full length on the sofa, her untidy dressing-gown disposed gracefully about her.

“What? Gone without meat on Fridays and had bread without butter? You may as well turn round, Magdalen! I know you’re raging.”

“I’m not.” She wheeled slowly. “It wasn’t my money, it was yours. But if I’d known I wouldn’t have helped you waste it, I’d have worked, I wouldn’t have lived on you. Oh, Doll!” hotly, “can’t you see it’s been madness? What have you ever got for all you’ve thrown away?”

“We’ve had a good time,” calmly. “What’s the use of talking about it? My money’s s-p-e-n-t, spent—and that’s the end of it. Now we’ve got to live on our wits.”

Magdalen Clyde looked at her stepsister curiously, as though she saw her for the first time—her fragile, waxen [Pg 6]prettiness; her careless mouth! her eyes, half tired and half mocking. For all the soft lines of her face there was something reckless in it this morning.

“Don’t stare at me,” cried Dolly petulantly. “You’ve seen me before and I’m not looking my best on this delightful occasion. And what you’re thinking is a waste of time! I’m not going to look for a place as housekeeper while you go out as a nursery governess. I’m thirty years old and the world owes me a living. It wasn’t my fault that I came into it.”

A curious expression flitted across Dolly’s face. But whatever caused it she kept to herself. Perhaps for only one second had she meant to tell why she had taken Magdalen.

“Don’t talk rubbish!” she said shortly. “Mother died—I had the money. You went to school and I got married; not for long, thank the powers! And anyhow, here we are without one penny. Your assets, I believe,” and she laughed, “are two black frocks, three indifferent hats and a red head. Mine are: Item—one husband, kindly removed by desertion; item—one small boy of three and ad infinitum—do you like my delicate wit?—debts, debts and duns. My looks I will leave out of the question; perhaps they are a little frayed around the edges. But my reputation, thanks to your eternal vigilance, is good! You’ve been quite worth your keep, my beloved!”

“What does your reputation matter?” hastily; with sense enough not to say what was on her tongue. Dolly Arden’s reputation! A hundred lucky slides over cracking ice, a habit of knowing no women who could talk about her escapades or her parties, a childlike callousness that thought the world both deep and blind. If these things build up a good reputation, Dolly Arden [Pg 7]had one. The girl dismissed the long list of men who had adorned her stepsister with various jewelry and vanished—though their presents stayed—and asked her question over again scornfully:

“Everything,” returned Mrs. Arden calmly. “It’s my stock in trade. I’m going to become a British matron; well-dressed, too. I’m going to drive through the rest of my life in a carriage and have bishops’ wives to tea.”

“You don’t mean”—there was never much color in Magdalen’s face, but now it was as white as paper—“he isn’t—you’re not going to dare to get married again?”

“On the contrary, I’m going to become a widow! You don’t look pretty with your mouth open like a codfish, my child, and your horror’s wasted. He,” significantly, “is not going to marry me. It’s my previous history that will enable me to consort with bishops’ wives when convenient, not my future.”

“Do you mean the kind who abide in asylums?” trenchantly. “For goodness’ sake, Doll, speak out! What do you mean? I know something’s happened. Last night you walked the floor, for I heard you, and this morning you’re a different creature.”

“Last night I saw no resource for us but to turn costermongers on half a crown capital! This morning”—a queer look, half excitement, half determination, came on her face; she stood up with her torn dressing-gown let hang as it liked—“this morning, Magdalen, Lord Barnysdale’s dead!”

“Oh, sit down,” wrathfully. “You look like Crazy Ann. I’m too tired for jokes. I never heard of Lord Barnysdale when he was alive; what does his being dead matter to us?”

“Everything!” she cried. “Barnysdale’s dead, I’m a widow—a widow!” and she waltzed round the room.

“Dolly, for Heaven’s sake!” said Magdalen furiously, yet her pale face, with its level black brows and somber eyes, might have been a picture in black and white for all the life there was in it as she caught the small dancing figure gently enough. “Are you demented or do you think I am?”

For all she knew about her stepsister’s marriage was that it had been unhappy, that the man had deserted her and that Dolly, in a moment of unwonted frankness, had once said his name was not Arden; though what it was she had not disclosed. For all her gaiety and her recklessness there was never a more secretive woman on earth—about her own affairs—than Dolly.

“Yes, I do.” Dolly’s lips grew very pale, her eyes defiant. “Let go of me and sit down while I tell you. But for Heaven’s sake poke the fire first! I’m frozen,” with a shiver, as if all her dancing had not quickened her blood.

“This is the last of the coal.” Magdalen’s hand dropped from her stepsister’s arm, but she did not move to the ugly, dull fire.

“The last? You idiot, I’m a countess! I’ll never worry about coal again as long as I live.”

For one second there was on Dolly Arden’s face a look that might have been terror. The next her small, fair head went back defiantly; if she found her voice by an effort it was imperceptible.

“You’ll have to,” she returned. “Look here,” pointing to the morning paper she had calmly taken from [Pg 9]the door of the next flat, “Barnysdale died last night; there’s the notice. And here’s the rest!” she pulled an envelope from her pocket and threw it to Magdalen.

As the girl took out the three papers that were in it Mrs. Arden looked, not at her, but at her own stone-cold hands. Her small face was bloodless; every fine line time—or other things—had marked on it showed out in the gray November light. If she were thirty and owned to it she looked forty, with that dreadful tenseness on her face as if she were trying an experiment she dared not watch.

There, in black and white, staring her in the face, was the marriage certificate of Dorothy Deane and John Ogilvie, Earl of Barnysdale, Viscount Stratharden; the baptismal register of Ronald, their only son.

“Doll!” she exclaimed, “why did you never tell me? And why did you worry like you’ve been doing? Why didn’t you go to him while he was alive? He would have had to do something for you.”

“I couldn’t,” hoarsely. “Read the last paper and you’ll see why!” but her mouth had grown suddenly lax as if with relief, and as she looked up her beautiful, shallow eyes were for the first time steady.

“Was he out of his mind?” said Magdalen, gathering the sense of that third paper incredulously.

“No,” doubtfully, hesitating, “only tired, I—I think. He——” She gave herself an angry little shake. Why was she telling her story as though it were that of some one else?

“Here,” she cried roughly, “give me the papers. I’ll tell you the whole thing! You know when mother died I went on the stage. Well, I wasn’t a success—that’s the long and short of it! And I got ill. I went down [Pg 10]to Hastings to a good hotel, with the last money I had. I thought I would eat and drink that, and then, if nothing turned up, the sea would be convenient. You were at that convent; you were only a girl I hardly knew. Anyhow”—as if she were defending herself—“you’ve never known, as I have, what it was to be afraid of life because you were poor.”

“Not then,” impatiently. “Can’t you remember? When she died there was just a lump sum and some stock in a mine that hadn’t paid for eight years; but of that lump sum I paid the money down for the rest of your education; you were only fifteen then and I didn’t want you with me, and the rest I kept for myself. It was only a hundred pounds and it went like that”—snapping her fingers—“and I went to Hastings. I didn’t care a straw for you in those days.”

“Well, I met him there!” with a hard breath through pinched nostrils. “We were married; not a soul knew but the registrar. He had his yacht there and we went away in her, and I was never called anything but Mrs. Arden! I didn’t care, because I had good clothes and enough to eat, but he told me plainly enough he didn’t mean to announce his marriage. He said he was sick of the people he lived among and—well, I suppose I wasn’t much like them,” bitterly, yet somehow with the bitterness of the actress she once had been. “We left the yacht and lived in London. My God! how dull it was! He was out all day long. I never knew a creature except my own maid.”

She moistened her lips, stiff and dry; it was harder to tell all this than she had thought. “Then Ronald was born and he—he was furious! I can see him now raging up and down. He wouldn’t have the child christened—wouldn’t [Pg 11]look at him. But when I got better”—every word seemed dragged out of her and, seeing the humiliation of her story, Magdalen could not wonder—“I had it done; and the next week he left me. That charming document,” pointing to the largest of the three papers on her lap, “was what he left behind him. You see that it’s to the point, genuine; no one,” with a crooked smile, “would ever think of making up or inventing a letter like that!”

Magdalen read it once more, this time aloud. It was scrupulously signed and dated, but it began with neither formality nor affection:

“Of all the wicked letters!” began Magdalen Clyde slowly, and sat looking at the unspeakable document. “What did you do? I would have”—her beautiful mouth straightened, her eyes grew veiled and evil—“I would have made him acknowledge me that very day or I’d have killed him!”

“You didn’t know him,” sharply. “I did. And nothing, not Ronald’s future nor starvation, would have made me live with him a single day when I’d once got rid of him! I sent the telegram.”

“I did. I wired that in accordance with his wishes I would make no claim on him during his lifetime. I hated him. I was thankful, thankful to have him out of my sight.”

“I never heard.” All her old lightness had come back to her and a certain something her stepsister had never [Pg 13]seen in her. “He’s dead!” she cried with dreadful, venomous joy. “He’s cold, and they’ll put him in the ground. And I’m alive and warm and a countess!”

“Hush! Stop! It’s unlucky,” Magdalen said sharply. “You’re not a countess yet.”

“It’s all the same. We’re made, Magdalen! I need never worry again about what my clothes cost. And now you can lend me your black hat and I’ll hasten to my defunct John’s lawyers. John was his name. Fancy an earl named John!”

“I don’t believe it,” said Magdalen Clyde to herself, even after seeing Dolly depart in a black gown—got, Heaven knows where—and the borrowed black hat.

Exactly what she had done to make herself look so pathetic and yet so dignified her stepsister did not know. She looked precisely as a deserted wife should look; tremulously brave, meek, yet determined. But even so, and in the face of those certificates and that letter there was cold, lurking disbelief in the heart of the girl she left behind.

“I don’t know what ails me,” she thought angrily. “Dolly tells lies, of course, but not to me. And this couldn’t be a lie, or she wouldn’t dare. But how on earth she can ever be a countess? Dolly, who hates everything conventional and never was civil to a woman in her life. Bah!” with sudden self-contempt, “it isn’t that and I know it. It’s that I’m frightened. I’d rather go and sing in a music-hall than have to live with Dolly if they find her story’s true.”

She looked round her with a queer feeling of being in a dream. Here in this little rose-colored room she and Dolly had lived for two years. She remembered how dumfounded she had been when Dolly appeared at the convent and calmly announced that she wanted her sister. Her maid was dead and she was too young to live alone. With hostile eyes under level black brows, Magdalen had stared at the pretty, exquisitely dressed stepsister [Pg 15]whom she barely knew. She had gone with her distastefully enough. And now——

“Now I’m glad I did,” she thought. “Dolly’s right; she’d have been talked about long ago if it hadn’t been for me. We sailed too close to the wind as it is. If I’d known what might hang on Dolly’s ‘reputation,’” quoting unconsciously, “I’d have made more fuss than I did about the men who gave parties for us. But it doesn’t really matter. She’s never lived alone since that man left her. A few dinners and suppers,” mendaciously, “can’t matter. She said we had a good time. Well,” with that sudden dark look, “she may have; we didn’t. I never enjoyed one of the parties she dragged me to. I hated the men and their suppers. I wish we’d never seen one of them,” and not even to herself did she say what she meant; that only one man of all they knew was loathsome to her.

Too full of suspense to settle to anything, not daring to go out lest Dolly should come home, she sat down, listlessly wishing that Dolly had not seen fit to take Ronald with her. The child’s society would have been better than her own.

The striking of the clock startled her. Five strokes, and two hours since Dolly went.

“Well, I’ve got to eat!” said she frowning, “even if it’s only bread. And I feel as if I’d sell my soul for a leg of mutton,” for luncheon, except for Ronald, had been an empty name.

She strolled into the servantless kitchen, where there was no fire and nothing to make one, and with a distasteful shrug provided herself with all there was—dry bread and tea. With these and a black kettle she returned to the sitting-room fire. The half pint of milk must be kept for Ronald.

She was an incongruous figure enough in the little [Pg 16]rose-hung room that she hated. Her black gown was only a shade neater than Dolly’s dressing-gown, but out of it rose a throat and face that in their strange way had no match in London. For if ever there was a beauty that was wild and uncanny it was Magdalen Clyde’s as she sat huddled by the grate trying to make a sooty kettle boil. Her almost white skin—and not a woman in ten thousand has a white skin—her black eyes that had bottomless depths in them under narrow, level brows blacker than they, were lovely enough. But under the crown of thick hair that waved back from her forehead their black and whiteness was a thing to marvel at. For her hair was the color of rusted iron—not red nor brown, but glorious; and she hated it every time she combed it. But her thoughts were anywhere but on her looks as she made tea to-day.

She had the steaming, comfortless cup at her lips when a knock came at the door. Not a loud knock, but a peculiar one. Miss Clyde set down her cup with absolute noiselessness and smiled.

“You can knock,” she thought, “but knocking never opened a door. I hate you, hate you, and if you could feel it through that door you’d——” But the queer uneasiness that had been on her ever since Dolly’s extraordinary tale was told deepened suddenly.

If the man at the door knew how she loathed him he would simply knock all the harder. And just as if he read her thoughts the would-be visitor gave the door a vicious shake. The girl sat without breathing till she heard him go away.

She had forgotten that man when she said she would even sing at music-halls for a living. If she and Dolly lost all their belongings and had to live by their wits they would never get rid of him. But if Dolly could prove her claims he would not dare to trouble them.

“Oh, I can pray she can!” Magdalen thought passionately, all her distrust and terror lost in something far more tangible. “We mayn’t know how to be great ladies, but Dolly need never be civil to a man like that again.”

She took up her tea and drank it thirstily, though it was flat and lukewarm. If Dolly were really Countess of Barnysdale there would be cream every day and——

It was Dolly. Dolly, half crying, half laughing, her demure hat on the back of her head, her gown unspotted by the rain that had set in out of doors. And the pretty, fragile child beside her had an armful of toys.

“Well?” said Magdalen thickly. Her cup went over as she jumped up and she let the tea lie in a pool on the rose-velvet table-cloth. “Well?”

“That’s just what it is! I went. I asked for Mr. Barrow, and—oh, it was awful! I was kept waiting in a musty little room and I could hear people talking behind a glass door. It made me frantic, for I knew they were talking about me.”

“They were. When Mr. Barrow came in I saw he knew all about us; he wasn’t surprised.”

“You don’t mean to say he observed you were very welcome, and could walk in to-morrow and take possession?” scornfully.

“No, he was non-committal enough. But he was civil and—— Magdalen, they can’t have any hope that I’m not Barnysdale’s wife, not a ghost of a hope! For Barrow gave himself away. He let me have ten pounds; I told the bare, plain fact that I was starving, but I might have starved ten times if that smug, respectable lawyer had not thought I was going to win.”

“I wouldn’t have taken it,” doubtfully. “But—oh, Dolly! you’re sure it’s all right? There isn’t anything they can bring up against you? Think! Because if we have to fight them we must fight well. There mustn’t be any surprises.”

“There’s nothing,” slowly. “Every step of my life since Barnysdale left me is clear and plain. I went from the rooms I was in to others, but always respectable. In the last of them my maid died when Ronald was a year old. And the day she was buried I went for you.”

“It’s only three years,” Magdalen said hopefully. “The people in the house where Barnysdale left you would know you. They could identify you.”

“Don’t rely on that,” she sharply returned. “The woman who kept those lodgings is dead. The place is turned into offices. All the others, though,” with a vehement confidence, “will know me.”

“A photograph!” Dolly had turned her back and was locking away the papers she had been too cautious to trust to Barnysdale’s lawyer. For a moment she stood with the key half turned, as motionless as a woman painted on canvas. “No,” she said slowly, breathlessly, “I don’t think there was any photograph. I—I would remember.” Her face was almost gray as she turned round, though it was only a very small proof to be missing.

“Where’s the money he gave you?” said Magdalen, pitifully. “I must get Ronald something to eat.”

She shivered as she sat down by the fire. Why could they not put her out of her misery to-day? If Magdalen [Pg 19]kept on harping about the thing she would never be able to bear it.

“I must think it’s all right,” she muttered feverishly, “or I’ll fail. After everything it would kill me if I failed,” and watching Ronald at his tea, Dolly Arden for once was hungry and could not eat.

“Magdalen!” she said with a sudden sharp appeal as the girl came back from putting Ronald to bed, “I can’t stand this. It’s only seven and I won’t sit thinking till twelve. Go and get Mrs. Taylor to sit with Ronald and we’ll go out to dinner. We’ve money.”

“Oh, don’t—to-night!” quickly. “We daren’t go anywhere with Barnysdale lying dead. It wouldn’t be decent.”

“Who’ll know?” contemptuously. “I tell you I’ll go alone if you won’t come. I can’t sit here.”

There was never any arguing with Dolly, and Magdalen knew it. With a heavy heart she went for the janitor’s wife, who was used to taking charge of Ronald; with a heart heavier still she put on her hat while Dolly’s strained voice called to her to hurry.

“I am hurrying,” she said sullenly, “but I think you’re doing a wild thing. We’re sure to meet some one who knows us. And I forgot to tell you, Starr-Dalton was here to-day!” significantly.

“What did you tell him?” Mrs. Arden turned sharply from the glass, her pinched face almost ugly.

“You don’t think I let him in! I let him kick till he was tired. It was just before you came. Didn’t you meet him?”

“No! I was in a hansom with the glass down. He’d never think of me in a hansom unless he paid for it.”

“Doll, you’ll pay him, won’t you, with the first money you get?” Magdalen’s voice was wistful.

“Yes. Don’t talk about it, please. I mayn’t get it, [Pg 21]after all,” and the look she gave her own reflection was that of one hunted from one desperate extremity to another.

“Come on,” she cried impatiently. “I suppose we’ve got to eat. Let’s go to some place where we’re not known—somewhere that the band plays.”

Once out in the air she thought her nerves would steady, but in Oxford Street she caught Magdalen by the arm.

“Here’s Krug’s,” she cried; “it’s as good as any. My knees won’t stop shaking. I can’t go any further.”

Magdalen looked at the flaring restaurant. “All right,” she said, but as soon as they were inside the red-carpeted place she wished they had gone anywhere else. The smoke, the women’s hats, a certain silence that fell as the newcomers found a table, were all obvious signs enough. The girl rose deliberately and changed her seat so that she faced the looking-glassed wall instead of the room.

“It’s beastly!” she muttered trenchantly. “Look at the men and the women!”

“It’s cheap,” studying the menu. “The people don’t matter. Anyhow, it’s better than sitting at home and worrying,” her lips quivering—Dolly’s, who never cried.

“Don’t worry now,” said Magdalen gently. She had no idea what a striking figure she was in her plain black dress and hat, nor that half the men in the room were twisting round in the effort to see her face in the glass. But something made her look to her left and then sharply back again.

A tall man in evening clothes, with a hard-cut, brown face, was looking intently at her. There was something sweet in his gaze, though his eyes were not soft at all, but steely, and the line of his thin cheek and jaw was grim.

He had the grace to look down at his dinner as for one second he caught the tragic, fathomless glance fate had put into Magdalen Clyde’s eyes. But he looked up again at the lovely profile against the blue-walled room, at the strange rusty-iron hair, the languorous power in the firm, dull-rose lips. He was not especially sensitive, but to see such a face in this place angered him. There was blood in it and breeding, but there was as well a strange, pure beauty that took his breath.

When his dinner was finished he rose. The girl did not concern him, and might be like all the others, but he had a curious dislike to seeing her beside the riotous, rouged women at the next table. He never noticed Dolly Arden at all. As he turned to get his coat there was a sudden commotion in a distant corner.

A pale man with the hall-mark of death on his face had sprung up on drunken legs; he was gazing across the heads of his party and their mock diamonds at the two women in black.

“Doll!” he shouted. “By ——, it’s Doll!” He knocked over his chair, lurched against the next table and stood pointing, glassy-eyed, at Dolly Arden.

“Don’t move!” Magdalen whispered. “Don’t look! Oh, Doll, he can’t mean you! You don’t know him!”

The man began to cross the room toward her; nearly fell over a girl, who screamed; struck passionately at the man with her; came nearer every instant to Dolly, whose lips were curled away from her teeth as if she saw death.

If she meant to or not, Magdalen never knew. She rose, turned and met the eyes of the dark, hard-faced man who was putting on his coat; met them with terror in hers, that were inky in the pallor of her face.

To be in a restaurant before Barnysdale was buried was bad enough; to be involved in the drunken row that was spreading like an epidemic from table to table, would ruin them. And worse than all was the look on Dolly’s face. She knew that consumption-wasted, staggering man who was getting closer every minute, calling more loudly on Dolly’s name.

“We must get out, quick!” Magdalen whispered, but her eyes never left those hard one’s that met them comprehendingly.

Dolly never answered, never stirred. It was as though she heard nothing but her own name over the hubbub; for as the author of the disturbance passed each table he hurled insults at the occupants, and the women who were concerned demanded loud vengeance.

And just as if he had heard her the hawk-faced man opposite made a quick step, which was instantly retraced. He was too late. That drunken beast would be at the girl’s side before he was and, if he knew anything, would be unmanageable. He nodded sharply to the white-faced girl who had sprung before the other woman; moved carelessly against the wall and touched something with his elbow.

“Come, both of you,” said a voice she would never forget to her dying day. “Hurry!”

The girl, clutching Dolly’s hand, felt herself pushed out of the room like a child.

The dark man’s knowledge of the restaurant was evidently as accurate as his acquaintance with the locality of the switch which would plunge it in darkness. How he piloted them Magdalen could not tell, but in a breathless instant she found herself in a back street. Behind them she saw the lights flash up in Krug’s windows.

“Call a hansom,” she said, for to walk might be to come straight on the man, who by this time was sure to have been put out. “Oh, I haven’t thanked you! I can’t. What made you do it?”

The man whistled for a cab before he answered her, and then lied—scrupulously.

“I’ve seen rows here before,” with a shrug. “I fancy you haven’t.” He could not tell the girl that what he had done was simply for what he had seen in her great eyes—for the pride and shame and anger in them.

“We never were here before!” she cried sharply. “We were lonely, we’d”—with truth—“no cook, so we came out to dinner. My sister was tired, and we thought Krug’s would do. How dare they let in men like that?” Even in the dim street he could see the dark fire in her glance. “He was coming straight for us, and I never saw him in my life.”

“He was ‘running amuck,’” he coolly remarked. “Suppose we walk on to meet a cab!”

He had no desire to be discovered on the back steps by an outraged proprietor. Half-a-dozen people must have seen who put out the lights.

Dolly, hanging heavily on Magdalen’s arms, had never [Pg 25]opened her mouth. The girl gave her an impatient shake.

“Come,” she said, “and do thank the man, Doll! If it hadn’t been for him we should have been in the papers; say something civil.”

But Dolly was past speaking. Limp and lifeless, she slipped through Magdalen’s arm to the pavement. The girl stooped and lifted her like a child.

“She’s fainted,” she said. “She was frightened to death. Where’s that hansom?”

“Here,” as one drew up beside the curb. “Please let me take her. You can’t manage it,” taking her words for gospel.

Dolly had had her back to him in the restaurant; he had no idea it was her name the man was bawling, though he might have put two and two together if he had seen her face. But Magdalen turned an abrupt shoulder as he would have taken Dolly from her.

“I can carry her,” she said with a queer feeling that she had been carrying Dolly all the time they had been together, and would have to carry her as long as they lived. The man stepped back quietly as she lifted the other woman into the hansom. He knew it was all she could do, yet she managed to look as if it were effortless. He had never thought a girl could be so strong. But, for all her strength she was panting as she turned to him and held out a slim bare hand.

“Good-night,” she said; “it’s no use trying to thank you, for I can’t. But if it hadn’t been for you there would have been—oh, I can’t think of it! But I want you to believe something. I didn’t know that man. I don’t see why he should have been coming straight for—me!” with a hesitation so short he did not see it.

“He imagined he knew you. They often do,” almost roughly. “Don’t thank me; I saw you didn’t want a [Pg 26]row, that was all. But if you’ll forgive me, I’d keep out of restaurants you know nothing about. Worse things might happen than a man calling across the room to you.”

The girl gave him a sudden glance. If it was full of uneasiness it was also somewhat threatening.

“It was not my name he called,” she said slowly, as if she were thinking between each word. “My name is Magdalen.”

Before he could answer she had slipped into the hansom, said to the driver something he did not catch and was gone. Her benefactor was left on the curbstone, with the vanishing cab the only object in view.

“Magdalen!” he thought, remembering the wonderful white and blackness of the girl, her strange, rusty hair. “Well, it’s no concern of mine, for I’ll never lay my eyes on her again, but I wish to Heaven she’d been called something else. For all the faces ever made for tragedy and passion that’s one of the most striking I have ever seen!”

But the girl was none of his business, of all men’s on earth. For which reason probably he turned and went back to the restaurant, in spite of his conviction that all the breakages during the evening would be put down to the person who had dared to take the law in his own hands and turn off Harry Krug’s electric light. Of money he had little enough, or he would never have entered the half-caste place, but it had suddenly come over him that the black-browed girl who could lift another woman like a feather and make a man who never acted on impulse play the fool to get her out of a tight place could also forget her unpaid-for-dinner. Really forget, or he would never have stirred a peg for her in spite of Krug’s long arm.

And so it happened that a tall man, with a cool and [Pg 27]guiltless countenance, appeared to the head-waiter in the now calm dining-room and paid “Magdalen’s” bill; also to his own surprise was caught and thanked by the proprietor for his evil action.

“In the dark he was removed,” said Krug gaily. “Next minute lights and—as you see! All compose themselves. You save me, sir, much noise, also police. Have at least a Benedictine?”

His benefactor was almost too surprised to decline, but he did and got out; to stand on the pavement outside with a grim hand in his pocket.

Yesterday his prospects had been gorgeous, even from his point of view; to-night——

“By George, I’d forgotten!” he said with a blank face enough. “Well, my dinner’s paid for, and I’ve often despised breakfast. I suppose the governor”—but his eyes hardened.

After to-day he had no desire to apply to his father for breakfast or anything else. With a whistle that was not gay this new pauper pursued his way past his club. That his subscription was unpaid had been quite unimportant yesterday; to-night he had no desire to go into a place where next week he would be posted. Besides, for all he knew, the thing might be common gossip, and a pitying look would make him wish to kick his best friend.

It was the melodrama of the thing that annoyed him; next week all the papers would have “Curious Case in High Life. Great Sensation.” And the papers, thank God! would not begin to know how curious the case might have been if it were known. In a black humor he made his way to the uncomfortable rooms he had called home since yesterday, when he had dashed out of [Pg 28]his father’s house for the last time. And there he sat down and reviewed the situation.

Assets—one penny and a large wardrobe. Occupation—none. Former employment—waiting for dead men’s shoes. Prospects—nil.

His glance fell on a book lying open on the table, as it had fallen from a hastily unpacked portmanteau. And his excellent eyesight was no pleasure to him as it marked a sentence in his brain.

“Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning! Quite chopfallen!”

“Chopfallen I won’t be,” he said to himself. “After all, I believe I’m glad: I never liked my father. What does knowing him a little better matter? And if things turn out as I think they will, I’m done with the whole brood. To-morrow I’ll set about making my living!”

The last sentence sounded so ludicrous that he laughed alone in the chilly, untidy bedroom. He who had never been taught to do anything but spend an allowance, to talk of earning.

With a real yawn he cast his troubles behind him and went to bed. And the curious thing was that instead of dreaming of his own probable starvation he only saw in his sleep a strange face, with black eyes and rusty-iron hair, a face that cried to him for help.

In their pink drawing-room the sisters sat at breakfast, both neat in black gowns, since goodness knew who might come to see Dolly; both oddly silent; both looking furtively at the cheerful little boy on the floor, whose existence might be going to change the whole face of life. Not one word had Dolly on the way home, or after, about that queer scene at Krug’s. She had crawled out of the hansom to her own room and locked the door, but this morning she knew by Magdalen’s face that the thing had to be thrashed out.

“You may as well say it,” she exclaimed harshly. “I know you’re thinking that last night’s affair wasn’t an accident. I suppose you imagine that beast was some one who knew me, and would spoil my luck. But you’re wrong. I never knew the man,” with a hard-set lip. “He frightened me because I thought he called me, and everything might matter now, even a drunken man and the straws in the gutter,” bitterly. “But if you’re thinking I knew him you’re cherishing a mare’s nest. I never knew him,” her small face assuming a curiously absent expression as if she raked in a half-forgotten past.

“I wasn’t thinking that at all.” The answer was unexpected. “I did think it, if you want to know, but in cold blood I know that if you’d a pleasant friend like that with a hold on you you’d not dare to play the game you’re at. You’re not brave, Dolly!”

“You temporize. Starr-Dalton, for instance! Why didn’t you tell him long ago, before you borrowed from [Pg 30]him, that you hated him? That he couldn’t come here? You can’t bear him. I’ve seen you quiver with rage at him.”

“Kind!” with a discordant laugh. “Because he lent you money? So would a Jew. And a Jew would only ask fifty per cent., while Starr-Dalton will want all you’ve got. But it’s not that,” trenchantly, “for if things are all right you can pay him—cash, not interest! It’s that it came over me while we were driving home last night that I saw Starr-Dalton in Krug’s restaurant—thick lips, blue eyes and all.”

“Magdalen!” It was a whispered shriek, if there is such a thing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you made a fool of yourself and fainted, and then locked your door on me. I had enough to do with thanking a strange man who may have got himself into an awful scrape for sheer kindness. You needn’t look as if I’d seen a tiger!” grimly.

“I think he was at the end table of all, behind the man when he got up. But I can’t be sure, for you know I’d my back to the room. It was only just before I saw our man,” with a half laugh, “intended to turn off the lights that I seemed to know Starr-Dalton was looking at us over that hurly-burly of noise. When I got out, as I said, I had an impression of his face, and it seemed to me that he was behind everyone, and instead of trying to help us just sat with that thick smile of his and waited. Luckily it’s no matter. And if he was there, and says so, we’ll have an excuse for being chilly to him hereafter.”

“After we’ve paid him! You can’t snub a man when you owe him a hundred pounds,” but it was not the money she thought of. Before her there rose that hateful restaurant, seen with Starr-Dalton’s eyes.

“I wish we knew what became of the man! Where he went afterward,” she said, getting up restlessly.

“Why? Since he doesn’t know you it would be all the same if he and Starr-Dalton walked out arm-in-arm!”

“Don’t,” said Dolly, and her face was livid. “Let me forget it. Ronald, come to mother. You love her, don’t you?” catching him to her passionately. “You trust mother?”

But Magdalen’s laugh was undeserved. There had been no affectation in Dolly’s sudden clutching of the child. In her fierce, frivolous way she was devoted to him. He was a trust to her, the only trust of her life that she meant to keep.

The postman’s electric summons made her put her boy down weakly. Her nerves were like water this morning. For a moment she literally could not read as she tore open the letter Magdalen brought in. The blue envelope was ominous. She had not expected any letter. Mr. Barrow had said—but the sense of the few lines suddenly pierced her terrified brain:

Lord Barnysdale’s widow sank into a chair and [Pg 32]laughed; laughed till her stepsister shook her, till tears ran down her face.

“Let me alone,” she sobbed. “Can’t you see it’s going to be all right. He says——”

“You little fool!” she cried; “he says I may go to the funeral. Do you think they’d have me there if they were doubtful? And can’t you see he says Lord ‘Stratharden’? If he meant to fight he would have said Lord Barnysdale.”

“Barnysdale’s brother. I never saw him. But if it were not for Ronald it’s he who would be Lord Barnysdale now.”

Every worry of last night’s adventure had gone from her. There was, as Magdalen said, nothing to matter. The Countess of Barnysdale and a drunken man seen in a doubtful restaurant would be no more likely to meet again than Barnysdale to get up out of his shroud. Starr-Dalton she forgot completely.

“Dolly,” Magdalen broke the silence curiously, “what about the funeral? You won’t go, will you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll go of course! In a carriage. I’d be a fool not to. It wouldn’t look well to stay away.”

It was a queer reason for attending the funeral of a husband, but it struck Magdalen that Dolly, for all her talk, had cared for the man. That was the only thing that explained her acceptance of his insulting terms, her quiet endurance of his desertion.

“No!” With a violence her sister did not know was in her Dolly turned. “I won’t see him! I won’t! I hated him!”

She recoiled from the very thought of the dead man in his coffin; not for ten earldoms would she look on that face.

“He might be smiling!” she cried hysterically. “I couldn’t bear it if he were dead and smiling, Magdalen. You don’t think dead people can see us, do you?”

“Not they,” practically. “Why should they care? Don’t look like that, Dolly; there’s no need for you to see him. I only asked you.”

“No, I’m sure there’s no need,” eagerly. “I can’t help being silly, Magdalen. I’m so nervous. But it will soon be over now; things always come right just when you’re despairing. When I’d spent the money Barnysdale left behind him and didn’t know which way to turn, that mine stock that mother left proved useful, although it hasn’t paid any dividends for the past six years. I sold out the stock and we’ve lived on it till now. I was in as low water then as we are to-day. And after to-morrow”—her small, pretty face confident, though she did not lift her eyes—“we’ll never want money again!”

But Magdalen was not listening. She had never noticed before that Dolly had cat’s teeth—white, narrow, sharp. It was queer she should think of that instead of Dolly’s prospects.

There was no shadow of doubt to cast on her claims; the dead man had kept his word and left a will that made them irrefutable. Without talk of law or courts, with merely a triumphal proving of his mother’s identity by the owners of the houses in which she had lodged with her baby and maid, three-year-old Ronald entered into his inheritance, Earl of Barnysdale, without let or hindrance.

And Dolly, with her old name, shook away all the haunting fears she had done her best to keep to herself. She asked for only one thing, that there should be as little publicity as possible.

“Of course,” she said with a pathetic face, “I know it will have to be in the papers, but I’ve led a hard life. I was humiliated and—surely, Mr. Barrow, you can understand! All this has been so abhorrent to me it was only for Ronald’s sake that I felt I had no right to remain silent.”

She breathed freely as she saw how short and how matter-of-fact the newspaper comments were. There was no nine days’ wonder about it, no staring headlines. She, Dolly Arden, was triumphant, was tasting the sweet after the bitter. It had been worth it after all. She had been a fool ever to doubt.

Barnysdale had been rather poor, for a peer, but to the new Lady Barnysdale her son’s revenues, or all she could touch of them, seemed inexhaustible. But at the thought [Pg 35]of the gloomy house in Berkeley Square, where Barnysdale died, she shivered. She could not live there—not yet. Besides, for many reasons, it would be better to get out of London. The men who had been welcome to Mrs. Arden would be doubtful acquaintances for Lady Barnysdale.

No, she would go to Scotland, to Ardmore Castle. It might be dull, but it was the right thing to be dull. She would not think any more on the matter, but pack up and go.

If Lady Barnysdale was triumphant, her sister was busy. It was she who bought new clothes, paid bills, engaged a nurse for Ronald. And so it chanced that when Lord Stratharden—who, for excellent reasons, had made up his mind to welcome the sister-in-law he could not cast out—came to offer her any information or help she needed, he did not see Magdalen Clyde. If he pictured Dolly’s sister to himself it was her double—small, fair, bloodlessly pretty—and not quite a lady.

If he could have seen her at that moment, with her dull hair, her pale, smooth cheeks, her dark, fathomless eyes lovely under her black hat, perhaps nothing on earth would have made him believe she was Lady Barnysdale’s sister.

Dolly walking up Fleet Street in the afternoon would have had eyes for every man she met. Magdalen never even saw that their heads turned as she passed, till one man, coming out of a dingy doorway, nearly fell over her and stopped dead, as she did; for neither had ever expected to see the other again.

Her first thought as he took off his hat and greeted her was that he was both thinner and older than she had fancied him, yet infinitely—oh! infinitely, better-looking. Tanned, strong, tall, his lean face like no face she had [Pg 36]ever seen, he stood in front of her. And as he smiled his eyes grew suddenly sweet.

Under them she was for one moment speechless. What long lashes he had! She wished he would not throw back his head and look at her through them.

“Fancy my meeting you!” was what she said; and if she was confused she did not show it. “You must let me thank you again now. I hope you heard no more of it.”

“Oh! I did,” he said, and laughed, for she had to thank him for more than she knew—all his worldly wealth but one penny. “I went back and was thanked by the proprietor. You see,” softly, “it saved him a row.”

“The proprietor,” Magdalen started. “Oh!” she said. “My—our dinner. I never paid him!”

“You forget,” with calm mendacity. “You or your sister left the money on the table. I hope she’s all right—quite forgotten your friend?”

“Did he tell you so? Krug, I mean?” for it was not like Dolly to leave money anywhere.

“Do you often honor Fleet Street?” he said. He had a way of drawling that was not like the speech of Dolly’s friends, any more than his look of perfect cleanliness resembled their rather tumbled fashion.

“No! I came on an errand for—my sister.” She dared not say Dolly. “Do you?”

For the first time he saw her smile, and Magdalen Clyde’s smile was a thing to live to see. The unworn youth of it, the lovely lips and teeth, the sudden light in her deep eyes, took away the man’s breath.

“I live here, work and have my being!” he returned as [Pg 37]if there were humor in it. “I work at a photographer’s up-stairs,” with a backward fling of his head.

He had quietly fallen into her step and was walking beside her toward Charing Cross. For the life of him he could not help wondering who she was and where she lived.

But she had evidently no idea of enlightening him, for at the end of the Strand she stopped.

“I’m late,” she said, and her face changed. “I must take a cab. But first will you tell me something? Why did you do that the other night? We were nothing to you.” Something in her straight, direct look made him tell the plain truth.

“Because I never saw any woman like you,” he said, as if he were remarking on the weather, “and it annoyed me to see you put in such a position.”

“There isn’t another like me,” she retorted as if he had hurt her. “Luckily for them! Do you suppose I like being black and white and red like a poster? I’m tired of being stared at, tired of—but it doesn’t matter!” bruskly. “I’m leaving London for good to-morrow. And I’m glad.”

“I hate it. I’m afraid of it. I haven’t a friend. Oh, yes!” stopping him coolly. “I know plenty of men, but I hate men. I don’t think I like anyone in the world but my sister; and I know I don’t trust anyone.”

“You’re trusting me,” said the man quietly. “Now [Pg 38]let me tell you something. It wasn’t because I thought you handsome that I turned out those lights, but because there was such a curious, lonely look about you, and, though you mayn’t think it, I’m lonely, too. I did what I could for some one who was like me, without a soul on earth to turn to. And if ever I can do anything for you again I will. My name,” with a little halt, for he was not used to it yet, “is Lovell—Dick Lovell. Now I shall call a hansom for you.”

The girl stood on the curbstone and looked at him. This was not the manner of the men Dolly knew. He meant what he was saying. Though his face was hard, almost indifferent, she had an odd feeling that for the first time in her life she had made a friend.

“You’ve done enough for me,” she said slowly. “If I ever see you again it will be my turn. Good-by.”

But as she got into her hansom a strange feeling came over her, as if in this utter stranger she were leaving behind some one known before, dear to her; some one, too, who would get nothing but ill for helping her. She held out her hand with a smile, though there were quick tears in her eyes.

“Good-by and good luck to you!” she cried, senselessly enough, and as she drove off remembered he knew no more of her name than Magdalen. Well, it was no matter—and her strange beauty hardened, darkened; the less he knew the less he would be likely to hear of Starr-Dalton and the others; of her reputation, that must be written down with Dolly’s. Dolly, who was Countess of Barnysdale and had given up cakes and ale!

“You’re a fool,” she said to herself. “The man’s nothing to you,” and knew she would have sold her soul for him. She, Magdalen Clyde, who had always boasted to herself that she was like a man who could not get drunk—she could not care.

With Dick Lovell’s face—and even the set of his collar—before her eyes she came into Lady Barnysdale’s flat. And there, smug, thick-lipped, too polite by far, sat Starr-Dalton with a gardenia in his coat. Magdalen could not be even civil, and Dolly was nervously, profusely so. When Starr-Dalton said good-by she turned on Magdalen viciously.

“Oh, I paid him,” slowly. “Magda, you’re right. He isn’t kind. I wish we’d never seen him.”

Mr. Starr-Dalton would not have echoed the wish. Divided between fury and amusement he was fingering the notes in his pocket.

“So,” he thought, “I’ve been useful, useful! And now I’m to discreetly vanish. It’s not good enough, Dolly,” and he turned toward Krug’s restaurant that he had never mentioned to her. It was raging passion, half love, half hatred, that made his thick smile evil as he strolled. For in his way he loved her, and what Mr. Starr-Dalton wanted he usually got, cleanly or otherwise.

“Ardmore Castle!” said the station-master in broad Scotch; “ye’ll be going there? Well, they’ve no sent for ye. Ye can get a fly to the ferry.” And he turned away.

“I’m——” Dolly was going to say Lady Barnysdale, but Magdalen caught her arm.

“It’s none of his business who you are,” she said angrily. “What does he mean about the ferry?”

“Ardmore’s across the Firth of Clyde. There’s no station; it’s an island. How dare the servants behave like this? I telegraphed.”

“Perhaps they didn’t get it,” indifferently. For it was cold, nearly dark, and she was tired of Dolly’s new grandeur, full of senseless, terrified depression that grew on her with each mile from London. If she could have done it decently she would have turned on the dirty little station and taken the first train back. But there was no leaving Dolly in a strange place to fight her own battles.

“Though there can’t be any to fight,” the girl thought scornfully as she collected the luggage and pushed Dolly into the moldy fly. It seemed a week before they stopped at a long pier, and even in the dusk could see the dark, swirling river between them and the opposite hills.

Magdalen turned from the roaring tide that held death in it to the black hills, the flying clouds. “I always knew I should hate it. I always knew it was just like this.”

The ferry was only a rowboat. It seemed there was no [Pg 41]regular ferry to Ardmore. And to the girl’s foreboding spirit every wave and eddy of the Clyde seemed to snatch at them threateningly, every whine of the wind from the hills to mock them.

“The tide runs strong the night,” said one of the two boys who rowed. “They say Clyde has its nights, and this’ll be one of them.”

“Night’s that it drowns,” carelessly. “Ye’re here. This is Ardmore.”

The girl looked at the towering shore. It would be pitch-dark among those rocks and bushes.

“Show us the way,” she said. “I’ll pay you.” And so it was that Lady Barnysdale came for the first time to her husband’s house—by a back way, in the dark, and with no more state than one sulky boy could lend her.

“They’ll no’ be expecting you,” said the boy insolently as they rounded a turn and saw the castle black against the sky, not a light in all the height of it.

Lady Barnysdale knocked and rang furiously at her own door without noticing him.

“What’s wanting?” he said, standing with bleared eyes and a hanging, repulsive lip.

“Open the door!” cried Dolly furiously. “Did you not get my telegram that I’m left to come here like this? I’m Lady Barnysdale.”

“Mrs. Keith’s away,” the old man returned dully. “There was a telgram. I did na’ open it. I ask your ladyship’s pardon.”

He took the bag she gave him, but he bestowed neither glance nor word on the new earl, who, being three years old, was placidly asleep in his nurse’s arms. [Pg 42]Magdalen saw the servant was very old and half palsied, and a queer shudder came over her.

What a home-coming! A doddering old man, who had not a word of welcome, a great stone hall, cold as a vault, with no fire in its wide hearth, one candle to light its lurking shadows.

It was all she could do to lift her foot and cross the threshold. She would as soon have entered a den of thieves as this house. Something tangible seemed to warn her out of the chilly, echoing place to go back; something evil seemed lying in wait for her, just as every wave of the river had seemed to snatch at her. Was she getting nerves like Dolly’s?

“There’s Grizel and Sophy,” doubtfully. “Mrs. Keith’s away,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.

“Mrs. Keith’s the housekeeper,” interrupted Dolly. “Please fetch one of the other servants and bring the telegram. Hurry!” furiously, conscious of the wondering gaze of Ronald’s grand new nurse, she stamped her foot at the old man.

It was a long while before a footstep came from the door by which he had vanished. And then it was only an obsequious country girl, with Lady Barnysdale’s unopened telegram in her hand.

“I suppose there are beds in the house,” Dolly cried, opening her own telegram and showing it to the girl. “Here is a letter from Lord Stratharden to Mrs. Keith. As she’s away perhaps you had better open it.”

“I wouldn’t dare, my lady!” the girl faltered. “I’ll give it to David. He’s Mrs. Keith’s husband; but you’ll [Pg 43]have seen he’s doddering. Grizel is lighting the fires in the guest-rooms, if you’ll please to come with me.”

“Guest-rooms!” cried Dolly. “Didn’t Mrs. Keith get my letter either? Why are my rooms not ready?”

“I couldn’t say, my lady. I’ll do my best,” nervously; “but you’ll understand we’d heard nothing but that his lordship was dead, and——”

“Oh, never mind!” sharply. “Take me to a fire, my good girl, and get us something to eat.” She would not have her antecedents aired before Ronald’s nurse.

But when she saw the bare, half-warmed rooms got ready for her she looked at Ronald with terror. The child might get his death here!

About one room only was there any semblance of comfort. It was small, with chintz-hung walls, less barnlike and drafty than the others. With her own hands Dolly—whom Magdalen had never known to do anything—aired sheets, piled wood on the fire, saw Ronald bathed and fed before she went down to her own dinner, and even then gave sharp instructions to his nurse not to leave him. As she opened the nursery door on the cold stone passage old David stood there.

“Dinner is served, your ladyship,” he said dully, as if he were repeating a lesson.

“Won’t you welcome Lord Barnysdale home?” she said almost piteously, pointing to the pretty child in his cot.

The nurse was for the moment in the next room and could not hear the tremor in her voice.

Dolly turned on him savagely, her grand manner all [Pg 44]forgotten. Not Barnysdale’s son! This child at whom she looked with terror sometimes, lest she should see his father’s likeness in him; her trust for whom she had faced the whole world.

“How dare you say he’s not Barnysdale’s son?” she cried, her muffled voice furious.

“Barnysdale’s son,” he mumbled toothlessly. “Oh, ay! Ye’re dinner is served.”

“Never mind him,” she said contemptuously. “Can’t you see he’s childish?”

“He can go and be childish somewhere else then!” Dolly’s fury was more like that of a lady’s-maid than a countess. “Every servant in this house shall go packing, except that Sophy girl. She did her best.”

She swept out into the bare stone passage, where a hanging lamp shone pale and every footstep rang. Down-stairs a fire had been lit on the wide hearth in the hall, but the crackling logs gave only light as they roared up the chimney.

Old David shambled forward and pointed to the dining-room door. As Magdalen followed Dolly in the quaintness of the room pleased her, for there was no stone here, only high oak wainscoting that shone with age and blackness. With shaded lights, new, brisk servants, a cook—and she laughed as she saw the new countess’ home-coming dinner was cold mutton—this room at least would lose the eery look of the rest of the house.

A long, low window in the wall opened into the great hall itself. Through it weird shadows from the sputtering fire seemed to nod at her. It looked a place for spying, for eavesdropping.

“Is there a curtain outside?” Involuntarily she had turned to David. “Then draw it, please.”

But it was Sophy, who was quicker-witted, that obeyed her. The old man only gave her a cunning glance as he lifted a decanter with a shaking hand.

In the cold dawn Magdalen Clyde got out of the hideous four-poster where she had tossed all night, and with shaking hands rekindled the dead fire. When a blaze was roaring up the chimney she bathed and dressed, as if cold water and clean linen could drive away the senseless terrors of the night.

“I’ll never sleep in this room again,” she thought crossly. “No wonder I had bad dreams in a bed walled in with purple rep!” She shuddered, as if the bare memory of her dream sickened her. “I was tired; I’d nightmare. What should I ever have to do with a Chinaman?” She scoffed at herself, and for distraction went to the window, where a cold rain beat upon the glass.

Outside lay a sodden, wind-swept garden, behind it black-clefted, threatening hills. In her ears as she leaned out, regardless of the wet, the muffled sound of the Clyde water that she hated, beyond reach, except that it seemed like a living jailer to keep her in this cheerless place. She drew back shivering and shut out the sound of the river with the raw, cold morning, as some one knocked at her door.

It was Ronald’s nurse with a cup of tea in her hand, and the neat woman stood staring at Miss Clyde.

“Good morning, miss,” she said. “I heard you stirring, and as I’d made my tea I brought you some. Oh, you do look ill this morning! Is anything the matter?”

For in the dull-gray light the girl’s eyes were inky in her dead white face, uncanny under her queer, dull-red hair.

“The matter? No!” And then she laughed. What was she making a mystery about? “I had a bad dream, Pearce; but don’t tell your mistress. Thank you for the tea; it was very thoughtful of you.”

“My lady’s not awake, miss. She was very tired. His lordship seems well. But if I might advise you I should go back to bed.” This was vague, if well meaning, advice.

“Bed!” Miss Clyde glanced at the purple catafalque. “Oh, I couldn’t! But you’re right, I don’t feel well. Do you believe in dreams, Pearce?”

“Well, neither do I! But this was so vivid that I’ve felt weak ever since.” She laughed at the fancy that came over her that if she told the thing she would forget it, and yet it drove her on, restlessly. “It was absurd. I thought I was sitting in a small room off a large one; it had two doors, one leading into a passage, the other into the big room, exactly opposite a long glass. It was that queer light you see in dreams, and I noticed everything that was reflected in the glass; just a bare, empty room. And then—I heard something. Some one moving with very quiet feet outside in the passage, and I heard the creaking of the door that led from it into the large room. I couldn’t move—in my dream; I sat and stared at the door in front of me, and I can’t tell you the awful terror that was on me. Just the terror of death, and nothing else.

“I couldn’t see anything, only hear that noise like some one moving, crawling. And then I knew that if I sat there one second longer it would have me—I’d be killed! I got up and went out into the passage, and I meant to run out of the house, but I felt there was some one between me and the entrance and I couldn’t.

“I looked from the passage into the big room, and over by the fireplace I saw a woman standing with her back to me. I didn’t know her. But between her and me, going to her step by step, was a Chinaman. He was directly in the light that seemed to come from a street lamp outside, and I could see his side face. He looked like a devil—a stooping, yellow devil, with a hideous white scar on his neck. I don’t know how I saw it, but I did.

“He had long, long nails, and he held his hands out crooked and wicked. I knew he was going to pounce on the woman by the fireplace and strangle her with those long, wicked fingers. I ran and tried to catch him, but I was too late.

“He had jumped at the woman. And as she turned—and if you can understand me, the silence of it all was the dreadful part, for she never screamed—I saw her face, and it was me. Me! And then I wasn’t watching any longer, for it was I, not she, who was struggling with him; I felt his claws of hands on my throat as we rolled over and over on the floor. I could see his face, all yellow and distorted, but his eyes were the worst. They looked like dead eyes, fixed and glassy.

“I think I must have fainted then; I was cold and wet when I woke up. It was only half-past twelve; I couldn’t have been in that bed,” with a glance of detestation, “more than an hour, and I’ve never slept since. Ugh! I can feel those nails on my throat yet.”

“It was horrid, miss,” said Pearce, “but it was only nightmare. You know, miss, you couldn’t have seen yourself.”

“But I did,” she firmly persisted. “I saw my own self looking at me to save her. Yet at first I was sure it was a stranger, for the figure was more like Lady [Pg 49]Barnysdale’s than mine. I think if I were to see the mildest-looking Chinaman I should run miles!”

“You’re not likely to, miss—not here! But I shouldn’t tell her ladyship; she seemed nervous enough in this strange house last night. I hope it will be more comfortable soon. The maids tell me the housekeeper returns to-day.”

“I shan’t mention it, but it did me good to tell you,” smiling at the woman as if she liked her. “You have plenty of sense, Pearce.”

“You need it, Miss Clyde, when you earn your living,” returned the nurse soberly.

When she was gone a queer thought overtook Lady Barnysdale’s stepsister. In spite of the absurdity of that dream she would not stay, or let Dolly stay, another night in this house, if it held two rooms like those in her dream—rooms opening into each other, with right-angled outside doors forming the corner of a corridor.

She ran down the stone stairs and went methodically from room to room of the large, rambling place. Some doors were open and some locked, but in no passage up-stairs or down were there two close together in the way her dream made vivid.

“Magdalen!” cried Dolly blankly, flying into the small room they had elected to sit in instead of the cold and hideous drawing-room. “Did you ever hear anything like it? I can’t send her away!”

“Who?” lazily questioned Magdalen. She had been out roaming the lonely hillsides in the wet, and if Ardmore Castle were not a bright abode it was better to [Pg 50]come back to than an unpaid-for flat, with no prospect of dinner.

“Mrs. Keith,” with wrath. “You know when she came back yesterday I thought everything would be all right. She was civil enough for a sour old Scotch woman. You haven’t seen her, have you?” breaking off.

“No!” She had no fancy for bothering about other people’s servants. Pearce was different since it was she, not Dolly, who had engaged her. “Why?”

“Because she’s an insolent old hag,” vindictively. “To-day, when you were out, I thought I’d go over the house and see what rooms I’d take instead of the barns we have. I want Ronald to have all the sunshine there is in this dismal country,” with a cross glance at the rain that had never ceased since their arrival. “I saw the old woman looking at me over the stairs as I rambled round, and when I got up to that cross-corridor on the second story there she was, with both maids, and a perfect storm of sweeping—in the afternoon. I told them to stop, and Mrs. Keith never took any notice. Said it was the regular day. Then I ordered her to get the keys of the locked rooms down-stairs; so she did. And when I opened them I saw her grin, for they were all empty. Just bare, cobwebbed holes. When we got up to that corridor again I marched over Sophy and the tea-leaves,” with fresh annoyance, “and found three locked doors at the very end of it, quite cut off from our part of the house. I asked for the keys—and what do you think she said? That they were Stratharden’s rooms, and not to be opened without his leave. Stratharden’s rooms in my own house!—and the very best southern aspect in the place, for up-stairs there are no windows on that side. Mrs. Keith looked at me as if I were just nobody, and didn’t even pretend to obey me.”

“Perhaps he was always allowed those rooms,” Magdalen pondered. “You don’t know, Dolly!”

“I know I’m not going to have shut-up rooms in my house, and I said so. I told her she must get more servants, that I would not have that doddering old David to wait on table; he drops things so frequently that I cannot resist screaming.”

“Said there were servants enough for people who came from the Lord knows where. So then I told her to go, bag and baggage.”

“She turned round and said I was wasting breath. That old David and she could not be sent away by me, Mr. Stratharden, or anyone. That his lordship’s will—and she didn’t mean Barnysdale’s, but his father’s—forbade it. And her eyes were just like gimlets in her horrid old head.”

“I suppose they can be retired as superannuated,” she observed. “The old lady doesn’t seem to think of that. We can’t live like this. I’ve rung for tea four times and not a soul has come.”

“Superannuated! I’ll have her put in jail,” violently. “Do you know Pearce has gone?”

“Mrs. Keith. I went up and found Ronald alone, and rang for Pearce. By and by Sophy came and said she had gone, that Mrs. Keith had dismissed her for impertinence and had her ferried over to the station.”

“But why did Pearce take her warning?” Magdalen asked utterly confounded. “She could have come to you, to me!”

“You were out. I was exploring the garrets. I found [Pg 52]a note from Pearce, who had evidently thought I had deputed Mrs. Keith to get rid of her. So then I sent for the old woman again. She said, quite coolly, that she could not bear strange women about the place, and that she’d paid Pearce and told her I should not require her any longer. Then she turned her back on me and walked out just as if she were the mistress, not I.”

“She must be mad. Pearce was a fool to go,” with a cold anger, very different from Dolly’s.

“What could the poor soul do? Mrs. Keith said I sent her, paid her and carted her off. And the unlucky part of it was that Pearce was stupid about Ronald this morning, and I was angry with her. She must have thought her dismissal was because of that.”

“Don’t worry,” said Magdalen as calmly as if she were not raging. “We’ll get her back. You go and bring Ronald down here and I’ll make somebody bring tea. I don’t care who does, but bring it they shall.”

“Good gracious! You do look awful when you scowl,” and Dolly really started. “You ought to be able to manage people. I shouldn’t like to quarrel with a girl with eyes like yours and a dead-white face. You’ll never be pretty, Magdalen, but you could be dangerous.”

For the courage and power in her stepsister’s face had suddenly flashed on Dolly like a revelation, though she was blind to the wild beauty of it.

“You couldn’t quarrel with me,” Magdalen laughed, in spite of herself, remembering the times when Dolly had tried it and failed. “Go on, I’ll get the tea.”

“Poor Sophy!” she observed. “She was between the devil and the deep sea. Now, Dolly, what are you going to do? Give in to Mrs. Keith and take charge of Ronald?”

“I’m going to write to Stratharden this minute and ask if what she said was true, about my not being able to dismiss her. I’ll give the letters to the postboy when he comes with the papers. My dear Mrs. Keith would probably claw it out of the bag. Does she think I am to be bullied in my own house?”

“If we can’t send her away I’ll wrestle with her,” she said. “I don’t believe you understand Scotch people. You have to get the upper hand once and for all.”

“I!” The girl gave a queer laugh. “I don’t know exactly, but they’re just like the Clyde—precisely as I knew they would be. I’ve the funniest feeling in this house, Dolly, as if I’d seen it all before,” her wonderful eyes clouding.

“Then I’ve no opinion of your sense. If I’d known what it was like, as you think you did, wild horses wouldn’t have got me here. I’d rather be in London, snubbing Starr-Dalton.”

“I only just remembered that I’d never asked him if he were at Krug’s that night. Perhaps it was just as well I didn’t. He knows my name’s Dolly.”

Lady Barnysdale opened her mouth and shut it again with ill-considered words still in it. In silence she wrote and despatched her outraged letter to Stratharden, beseeching him to deal with Mrs. Keith and send a proper staff of servants.

It was two days before she got his answer. Forty-eight hours, when she fretfully refused to go out or [Pg 54]leave Ronald, even to let Magdalen try to put the fear of God into Mrs. Keith.

“What’s the good when we don’t know whether we can do anything?” she demanded sensibly enough, and Magdalen agreed with a shrug of her lovely shoulders. But she could stay in no four walls even for Dolly. She tramped up the high hill above Ardmore Castle on the second day and looked down on all Ronald’s property, on the rushing Clyde water that hemmed Ardmore in. And not till then did the full loneliness of the place come over her.

Ardmore had been a famous stronghold in its day; even now it was nothing but a rocky island, some five miles long and half as wide. There was not a village or a house on it, but some fishermen’s huts that she could scarcely see in the dazzle of the low sunlight. They were far below her on the shore, and three miles off if a yard.

As she watched she saw a small steamer touch at a point and go off again. That must be the ferry Sophy said you must cross by when the Clyde ran too heavily for a rowboat. The opposite shore was Ronald’s, too, and a queer possession it looked, all rolling hills black against the sunset.

Magdalen turned and saw on the other side of the river from which they had come to Ardmore, more wild hills, higher, more desolate, showing their teeth of crags and gullies as the sun dropped.

“Well, I’ve got my bearings, and much good may it do me,” she said, little knowing. But the walk and the air had raised her spirits.

She went into the castle humming a song Dolly assuredly had never heard, and gazed with astonishment when the door was opened to her by an immaculate London footman. Lord Stratharden then had not let the [Pg 55]grass grow. The man must have come by that steamer she had seen touch at the point this afternoon.

“Stratharden must be a marvel,” she said, finding Dolly by her sitting-room fire. “Catch me getting servants for a lady who’d supplanted me and my son! And such an immaculate footman, too!”

“He’s done the best he can,” she returned, “but even he says Mrs. Keith can’t be dismissed, and begs I’ll be patient with her. Where’s his letter? Oh, here! Listen: ‘I know Keith’s cross-grained ways must be a sore trial to you, and for her unpardonable conduct in dismissing your maid I can of course offer no excuse. I can only ask you to be patient with her, and remember that she was my son’s nurse, and is broken-hearted that he is no longer heir to Ardmore. I hope you can find some capable country girl to look after your boy, and in the meantime, as I am going abroad, it is both a pleasure and a convenience to me to send you my two men servants, hoping you may keep them till I return. James is a capable servant and used to managing Keith. My Chinese butler you will find better than any nurse, and most useful to——’”

“The Chinese butler. He’s dressed like an Englishman and he speaks perfectly. What about him?”

It is hard to tell how commonplace things grow slowly into terror, intangible and unseen, but sure as death. Into the dull life at Ardmore Castle horror had crept; even Dolly could not be blind to it, and it haunted Magdalen Clyde by night and day.

The awful loneliness of the place began to hang over them like a pall. For a month they had been installed, and not a visitor from all the countryside had been near them.

“Not even a grocer’s boy!” Dolly said to herself uncomfortably, though there was nothing remarkable in that. Their meat was home-killed, their other stores came once a year from Edinburgh. And in spite of the silver-decked table and Stratharden’s invaluable servants, there was no doubt that Mrs. Keith barely doled them out enough to eat—that was eatable.

The horses, in spite of reiterated orders, had never come. James made one respectful and well-grounded excuse after another—“next week,” “to-morrow”—and neither brought them. As for rowing across the Clyde it was not to be done. One winter storm after another made it angry, and not a servant in the house could row. Magdalen, going to the tumble-down boathouse to see the boats, found none; she screamed herself hoarse in trying to hail a boat from the opposite shore that was two miles off; and found herself civilly assisted by James, at whose appearance she turned about and went home.

After long wet days in the house, when the clouds [Pg 57]broke at sundown she would drag Dolly out to walk in the evergreen shrubberies. But in a little while Dolly’s eyes would meet hers and they would go indoors quickly, Ronald angrily protesting from his aunt’s shoulder. But to the lonely, unhappy women it had been certain that stealthy feet kept pace with them behind the dripping firs, that eyes were on them hungrily as they walked.

“It’s nerves,” said Dolly in an angry whisper; “nerves, or Mrs. Keith.”

They had long ago moved into those forbidden rooms of Stratharden’s, but neither of them felt any better for the change. The southern aspect was a mockery in a Scotch winter.

Ronald grew paler every day, had a queer little asthmatic cough and seized every chance of spending his time with Ah Lee, who seemed to fascinate him. On Mrs. Keith Magdalen had never laid eyes. Sometimes in the long nights she fancied she could hear the old woman’s skirts brushing against her door, and would get up silently and creep there and then on to Dolly’s and Ronald’s apartments, for the three rooms connected; would feel that the bolts were all shot home, and slip back to bed again, not even owning to herself that it was not terror of Mrs. Keith that made her do it.

She turned now to where Dolly sat on her bed taking off her wet boots after one of those garden outings that had been worse than usual.

“It may be nerves, but it isn’t Keith,” she began, and then decided, for the fiftieth time, that it would be madness to frighten Dolly about Ah Lee because of a dream.

“Do you know what I found out just now?” for she had sent Dolly and Ronald to the house, while she ran back in a towering rage to ransack the shrubberies. “I ran along by the garden wall till I came out on the [Pg 58]avenue, ever so far from the house; and there was the postboy! He was giving letters and papers to James.”

“It never stopped crossing,” Magdalen dryly replied, “except for two days. I asked the boy.”

“James explained,” more dryly than ever, “he had been no wiser than we, etc. Mrs. Keith must have done it to annoy us. He would take great care in future; could not be too glad that he had been tempted to investigate—but he did not say it before the boy! Here are some papers and a letter for you.”

“Who do you think it is? And what do they mean?” she said, with a queer look in her shallow eyes. “I think James told the truth, and it’s just old Keith, who, because she hates us, wants to drive us away.”

Magdalen threw open the door into the passage. It was empty, dark and cold, and she shut it again. For a moment she stood facing Dolly, stood stretching like a cat, as if she were trying every muscle in her body.

“Oh, don’t do gymnastics; talk!” cried Dolly pettishly. “Don’t you think the old wretch wants to drive us away?”

“She takes a queer way to do it,” Magdalen gravely answered, seating herself close to Dolly and speaking in a subdued tone. “Hasn’t it struck you that being a countess here is extremely like being in jail? Suppose we say we’re going to London to-morrow? Well! there are no horses to take us the five miles to the steamer that comes here, and you and Ronald can’t walk.”

“We can’t, for I’ve tried it! We’ve no boat, and it’s [Pg 59]no more use to try and hail one from the other side than to sit here. There’s a rocky point between us and the mainland; no one can see us.”

“You’re talking nonsense.” The familiar obstinacy was in Dolly’s voice. “I’m mistress in my own house, I suppose. It’s rubbish to say I can’t get away from it. But I don’t mean to be driven out to please Mrs. Keith. It’s she who’s always crawling after us. She shan’t think she can frighten me.”

It was not Mrs. Keith who was frightening Magdalen. She looked at Dolly with veiled black eyes and lay back on the bed, a lovely, careless figure; against the old embroidered coverlet her rusty hair seemed to catch all the light left in the room. There was only one thing to be done—get away from here and tell Dolly afterward. The very inaction of the quiet face showed the utter strength in it as she thought of something that had never entered Dolly Barnysdale’s head.

“I wouldn’t fuss over Mrs. Keith’s feelings,” she observed calmly. “It’s deadly dull here, and some one hates us, it doesn’t matter who. And I don’t think Ronald’s well.”

“What do you mean?” she angrily cried. “Are you trying to frighten me? Of course I know he’s pale and has a cough, but he was always pale.” There was something wild and untamed about her small figure as she stood over the quiet girl on the bed.

“He wasn’t always—drowsy!” said Miss Clyde slowly. “Look at him now.”

Dolly whirled round, took a quick step and stood still. There on the hearthrug in the middle of his toys lay Ronald—asleep! He was pale indeed, and round his open mouth and his closed eyes were faint blue stains.

Lady Barnysdale shook as she saw them; yet for a moment her face was that of a woman looking at a child she saw for the first time. The next instant she had the boy in her arms with the fierce, soft tenderness Magdalen hated. “Do you mean——” she began in a hushed rage not like her.

“I don’t mean anything. The boy’s ill and we’re not comfortable, so don’t let us stay.”

“Don’t be superior,” said Dolly sharply. “You as good as said Keith was drugging the boy, and now you try to back out of it. But we’ll go to-morrow.” Her voice rose hysterically. “She hates me because she’s just devoted to Stratharden, and she’s capable of anything.”

“I don’t think she has anything to do with it,” Magdalen coolly declared. “She wouldn’t dare. But we’ll go to-morrow. I’ll be only too glad.” There was no use in telling Dolly things till they were away from this house.

“We’ll see to-morrow,” Magdalen Clyde said to herself. Outwardly she only shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

Dolly sat clutching Ronald like a woman possessed. She never touched the dinner sent up to her—for she had no intention of letting the boy from her sight while Mrs. Keith was in the house—and never even thought of her unread London letter till Magdalen came back from the meal she had made as short as possible, under Ah Lee’s hateful eyes.

The girl glanced at Dolly’s set little face, the tension of her figure. She had been a fool to get her into a state like this, but——

“If I hadn’t waked her up to it Ronald would never [Pg 61]have left this house alive!” she thought, for she had not lived in London for nothing, nor for nothing haunted the slums near Dolly’s house, while Dolly had men to tea. “Here’s your letter,” she said in a matter-of-fact way; “aren’t you going to read it? I’ll put Ronald to bed.”

She was half-way into the next room when a queer sound made her turn sharply; she had no fear of waking the boy she had taken from Dolly’s tired clasp.

“What’s the matter?” she cried, for on Lady Barnysdale’s face was the look Dolly Arden had worn that night in Krug’s restaurant.

“It’s——” The words came stammering, incoherent. “We must get out of this. It’s Starr-Dalton. He wants to come here.”

It seemed to Magdalen that even Starr-Dalton would be better than no one. Had Dolly no sense? Did not she see what was plain as print?

Magdalen put out a hand as if to take the letter, but Dolly ran to the fire and threw it into the blaze.

“What does it matter what he says?” she cried contemptuously. “Starr-Dalton! I didn’t half read the thing.”

There was no earthly reason that it should matter, yet as she turned away Magdalen knew Dolly was lying.

For once the sun shone into those southern rooms next morning when Lady Barnysdale woke, and for an instant it cheered her. Rain would have meant another day in this dull, eery house, where some one hated her, where at any moment Starr-Dalton might arrive with his two days’ worn collars and his coarse smile.

She got up and dressed with feverish haste, yet when she looked at Ronald she felt as if the worst fear of all had vanished. He looked a different child after his night’s rest. Magdalen had frightened her for nothing; the thing was too monstrous; no one, even in this house, would harm a little child.

Magdalen read her face like a book; and the relief on it made her shrug her shoulders. She had not told Dolly even half of the queer things she had seen yesterday afternoon; in consequence “everything was lovely and the goose hung high” this morning to that lady. But tell she would not till the last pinch.

“Well!” she said, “are we going to-day, or not? Because I want to know what boots to put on.”

To go meant a five-mile walk to a doubtful ferry; Ronald was himself again; there was no need—but suddenly she saw Starr-Dalton’s envelope that she had forgotten to burn.

“Go! Of course we’re going!” she said sharply; for nothing on earth would make her stay where that man could find her. “But I’m sure you’re wrong about Ronald. Look at him.”

“I dare say,” responded Magdalen carelessly enough. Her heart gave a bound at the thought that Dolly was absolutely moved to do something; saw that she had no desire to be friendly with Starr-Dalton, though, if she had not been so full of other things, that might have seemed the worst sign of all.

After all it only took a little resolution to cut most coils, and this one was disappearing like an ugly fog. All they had to do was to walk out of Ardmore Castle, and there would be no more remembrance of queer dreams, nor terrors of servants.

It was not at breakfast or lunch that Magdalen had any fears for Ronald; it was his milk at night, his cups of soup during the day. But after to-day there would be no more of that.

Miss Clyde’s thought turned gaily to that big, safe London she had once said she hated; to a little house somewhere, with nice women servants; to—and the blood flashed into her pale face and sank again—the chance sight of a calm, self-possessed face and clear eyes that were like no others.

“I’m a fool; he’s forgotten me by this time,” she thought scornfully, and set herself to the business in hand.

There was to be no mention of their purpose, even to Ronald. They would just stroll out in the garden as usual, and once out of sight of the castle windows make for the highroad leading those five long miles to the fishing village, by a short cut over the hills. Those long prowls of hers had been useful, for all Dolly’s growls at them.

Magdalen turned where she stood in the garden, waiting for Dolly—and bit her lip with helpless annoyance at a very small thing.

Lady Barnysdale stood at her elbow with Ronald, and instead of her short country skirt and her sailor hat, was attired from head to foot in her best and most becoming widow’s weeds.

“You might as well have given out your intentions,” Magdalen dryly observed. “For Heaven’s sake, Dolly, what possessed you to dress like that?”

“I’m not going to London looking like a sweep!” she smartly replied. “Besides I want my veil; we might meet Starr-Dalton.”

“As if it mattered!” Magdalen contemptuously replied, but Dolly seemed deaf.

“Come on,” she said, picking up her long skirt. “You needn’t think I’m going back to change; it’s no use glaring at me.”

It was certainly no use to stand there, with Dolly’s purpose advertised in her town clothes; but all the girl’s gaiety was gone as she took Ronald’s hand silently and led the way hastily into a screen of shrubs. Yet no one could have been spying on them so early in the morning, for there was assuredly not a soul about the devious paths that led out on the wide moor they must cross to get to the highroad. It was steep, but it cut off two miles; and even Dolly never grumbled as she toiled along, her elegant train cast over her arm. Magdalen with Ronald on her back panted a little as she led the way. To carry even a light child piggy-back is harder work than one knows.

“There!” she cried, stopping on the brow of the hill and pointing down. “There’s the road and now it’s only a mile to the store. We must keep to this little track that goes through that cluster of firs. It’s frightfully swampy on each side.”

Success and exertion had painted Magdalen’s cheeks a pale-rose; she was a sight to make an old man young [Pg 65]as she stood with the child on her back, her gorgeous hair catching the sun and her deep eyes blacker than ever.

Dolly, exhausted and bedraggled with holding up her finery, was another story. Her smart widow’s bonnet was over on one side and her whole appearance worthy of bedlam, between mud and bushes.

“I think we’ve made frightful fools of ourselves,” she said crossly as they neared the bleak grove of stunted firs. “I wish to goodness I’d just said I was going and made James get a boat. Of course he would have done so. It was just your nonsense that he wouldn’t; like you thinking that stuff about Ronald.”

She was staring at the path where it entered the firs with a curious sense of danger. A cloud swept over the sun and made her shiver; from the time she was a tiny child she had always hated stray clouds to obscure the sun. She shifted Ronald to her shoulders and let Dolly pass her.

Dolly had disappeared in the firs and her angry voice came back on the wind. Who was she talking to?

Well inside the cluster of firs stood Dolly with her back to her; in front of her, completely blocking up the narrow path between the thick trees, stood a gamekeeper in worn velveteen; a burly, respectable person with a smooth-shaven face, remarkably pale for a person who spent his life out of doors. And Dolly was storming at him like a fury.

“Pass? Why shouldn’t I pass?” she cried, and her rakish bonnet was ludicrous, her held-up skirts filthy. [Pg 66]“How dare you stop me on my own place? I’m Lady Barnysdale.”

“That may be,” returned the gamekeeper, with a grin, and Magdalen saw he was not Scotch, “but you don’t pass here.”

“What’s all this?” said she from behind, and the man’s face changed a little as he saw her, but he never budged.

“You can’t go through here, and that’s all about it,” he said, taking no notice of Dolly’s furious tongue.

“No, not I,” he coolly returned. “But this is no place for walks and you’d better go back.”

“Nonsense!” Magdalen’s temper had come to her at that laugh. “Lady Barnysdale and I are going to the village. Get out of the way at once.”

“Then you’ll not go this way,” with impudent admiration of the tall girl’s black eyes.

“I suppose you’re Lady Barnysdale’s servant,” said Magdalen icily. “Do you mean to disobey her orders?”

“Just that,” he said rudely. “Get back now the both of you. My orders are that no one’s to go to the village—even if it were the queen!”

There was something in his face that made Dolly shrink. She sprang to Magdalen’s side.

“Oh,” she said in a whisper, “who is he? I don’t believe he’s a servant. I’m afraid of him. Come away.”

Magdalen looked the man up and down. If he had been respectful she could have dealt with him; as it was she suddenly remembered that they were two women on a lonely hillside, and their way was obstructed by a burly blackguard.

As she thought it he stretched a hand to clap her on [Pg 67]the shoulder, half threatening, all insolent. And for a second her black eyes staggered even him.

“You’re lying, and you know it,” she said composedly. “There’s no excuse for your not letting us pass. But if you won’t get out of our way we can get out of yours. Come, Dolly!” and she had Dolly turned and safe in front of her before she took her eyes from that evil face.

Magdalen’s knees were shaking as she followed, leaving the man laughing. She tried to believe he was a poacher and that to pass him would mean insult, perhaps robbery—and Dolly had fifty pounds in her pocket. But she knew quite well that, whoever he was, he was all of a piece with every other thing in Ardmore Castle.

“Come,” she said bravely and not casting a glance behind her. “We’ll have to go back and take to the highroad, where we came out of the garden. We won’t be stopped by a tramp.”

Dolly gave her no answer, but a feverish cry to hurry. The one cloud had stretched all over the sky and rain was spitting in their faces. By the time they got back to their starting-point all three were drenched, Dolly’s crape a reeking, flabby mass.

“We must go home. It would kill Ronald to do anything else,” she said, and if her voice was hoarse it was not cowed. “Anyhow it seems to me we’d have no better luck on the highroad. That man was no accident; but one more in my little score against Mrs. Keith.”

“I don’t know,” said Magdalen dully. “Get on, Doll; we can’t stand here in the rain.”

She looked sharply at James as he met them in the hall, with a face of commiserating wonder at their plight.

“Oh, my lady!” he said quite naturally, “I had no idea [Pg 68]you were out till you did not come to luncheon. I was just going to look for you with umbrellas.”

“It would have been quite useless,” said Dolly quietly. “Please send Sophy up with hot tea at once. It’s too late for lunch.”

At the man’s concerned look as he hurried away Magdalen began to wonder if the balance of her mind were right, and she was not imagining stuff because of that coincidence of her own dream about a Chinaman. That man on the hill might have been a poacher; but if there were any truth in what she really thought of him it lay deeper than any old woman’s hatred for Dolly. No housekeeper, sour as she might be, would dare to play a trick like that. And it was all very well to sneer at herself for a superstitious fool, but it was after Stratharden’s men came, and not before, that some one had been always haunting their footsteps; let alone that thing of yesterday, of which she had not told Dolly.

With a shiver that was only half weariness she busied herself in getting off Ronald’s wet clothes. When the tea came—with a separate jug of milk for Ronald—she quickly gave him cream and hot water instead.

In exhausted silence Dolly lay back and watched her. They were both thinking the same thing, with a different theory behind it; but before Ronald, who loved Ah Lee, Magdalen dared not let Dolly speak of it.

At Ronald’s bedtime the two looked at each other. There were no keys to the nursery door, and during dinner they must leave the child alone. It was in Magdalen’s room that they left him, sound asleep and locked in.

With the keys in her pocket Dolly talked at dinner with her old, reckless gaiety. Neither James nor Ah Lee should be able to report to Mrs. Keith that her ladyship had met with a reverse in her morning walk.

But Ah Lee, after the soup, disappeared; and James was unaccountably lazy in bringing the pudding.

“That brute Keith!” exclaimed Dolly angrily. “If I wasn’t still hungry I wouldn’t wait. Oh, Magdalen, can’t you think of something?” bursting out with what she had had on her mind all dinner-time. “Some plan of getting away, for after to-day——Oh! I’m frightened! The place is just our jail.”

“I know,” said Magdalen softly. “I——” She gazed at her own reflection in the glass above the high mantel-shelf as she tried to think what was the best thing to do. If she were right, and not Dolly, it looked as if they must stay here till some one had had his way with Ronald.

As she stared at her own pale reflection a quick astonishment came into her eyes; why she shaded them with her hand she best knew, and certainly her answer was a queer one—to the miserable appeal that had been in Dolly’s eyes.

“I dare say it’s very nice in summer,” and the slow, irrelevant words were utterly indifferent. “Don’t let’s wait for pudding, Dolly. I’m tired.”

Magdalen got up and stood waiting, her eyes still on the glass. Dolly stared at her. Too amazed to speak she pushed back her chair and followed Magdalen out.

“What’s the matter with you?” she began crossly when they were in her room. She unlocked the door leading into Magdalen’s, and was turning back to her own fire when she saw her stepsister’s face.

“Come here in my room,” said the girl very softly, passing her like a noiseless wind and drawing the bolt across the door.

“What is it?” Dolly whispered. “For Heaven’s sake, what makes you look like that?”

“Man!” Lady Barnysdale cried. “Do you mean the one we met this morning? How on earth should I know?”

“A gentleman! You’re mad,” said Dolly. Surely she had enough to worry her without being told things like this. “There can’t be anyone in the house but us.”

“Dolly,” she said slowly, “you really have no idea where Lord Stratharden is?”

“Listen!” and there was something in the hushed voice that made Dolly quiet. “Is your brother-in-law dark-haired, with light eyes sunk in wrinkles? Has he a way of smiling—that isn’t smiling—when he’s interested? And eyebrows like”—she signed with her fingers over her own level ones—“crooked, you know, and very finely marked?”

“You never saw him!” said Dolly, recoiling as from a too life-like portrait. “You said so.”

“To-night! How could you? He’s away abroad,” with scornful eyes on the girl who sat between her and the light, uncanny in her black and whiteness. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s here,” said Magdalen grimly. “I saw him to-night in this house.”

Lady Barnysdale’s tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth; her dry lips shaped the words she could not say. She sprang to the bell and a hand drew hers from the bell-rope.

“But if Stratharden’s here—oh, you don’t understand; he was more than kind to me—all I have to do is to tell him about Keith. But—he can’t be here! He wouldn’t arrive and I not know. You couldn’t have seen him.”

She stood a second listening; then, as if she heard what she expected, pushed Dolly back into her chair. She pulled a note-book from her pocket and wrote furiously, thankful that Dolly had sense enough to sit silent, and presently pointed imperiously at the page.

“Don’t speak,” she read. “I hear some one in the corridor. I saw the man I told you of to-night when we were at dinner. I was looking in the glass, and that curtained window leading into the hall was reflected there. Some one lifted a corner of the curtain outside and I saw a man’s face—a gentleman’s. He must be living in the house, for I saw the collar of his smoking-jacket. If it was Stratharden what is he doing here secretly? Why does he spy at what you do?”

“I mean we can’t get away, and I found out—never mind how—that Ronald’s milk was being drugged. Is Stratharden poor because of him and you?”

“You knew his brother!” wrote the girl cruelly. “You were married to him.”

“My God!” said Dolly exactly as if she were praying in church. “But Stratharden could not be like him.”

The words were not over her breath—a queer thing for Dolly; her lips parted as if she were going to faint.

Magdalen owned no smelling-bottle. She moved sharply into Dolly’s room to get hers, and something made her glance at the door she had bolted and then go into Ronald’s empty nursery. When she came back no one could have suspected the awful terror in her soul.

“Do you bolt your doors at night?” she said softly, for Dolly at that minute could not have read another line to save her life.

Dolly nodded dumbly, and Magdalen waited patiently till the color came back to her sister’s lips. Then she wrote something she dared not say, wondering all the time if she were a fool to let Dolly know it.

“Then lock them,” she scowled; “there’s only one screw in each bolt socket—and leave the keys crossways in the keyholes.”

Slowly, like an uneducated woman, Lady Barnysdale wrote a sentence that was barely readable.

“There’s me!” she wrote with a half laugh. And if [Pg 73]she were Dolly’s sister there must have been good blood in her somewhere, for a sudden courage shone in her face; while Dolly sat more dead than alive, her lower lip drawn away from her teeth. Magdalen could not think looking at Dolly, and think she must. She moved noiselessly into her sister’s room and stood there checking off her thoughts on her fingers.

“First, there’s Ronald! He looks just like Mrs. Malone’s boy there was all the fuss about—and a Chinaman was at the bottom of that! Then here’s a house miles from anywhere, Scotch servants who believe some lie—no matter what—about Dolly; a footman and a Chinaman”—once more that horrid thrill of fear came over her—“who belong to a man who’s supposed to be abroad and is in this house! I wonder how long he’s been here! I’ll go bail Mrs. Keith had excellent reasons for not letting Dolly explore! If I know anything about faces he is clever, but he was frightened, too, because we so nearly got off to-day. A frightened man does things in a hurry.”

She drew a long breath. With three men and an old woman against her it was long odds against Magdalen Clyde; but even so she would be harder to handle than Dolly.

“One good thing, he can’t know I saw him. I covered my eyes too quickly,” she ended and turned to go back to Dolly as quietly as if she did not hear in the corridor outside a step that crept foot by foot with hers. Half-way in her own room she stopped and looked behind her.

There was a little click, a gleam, as the polished brass handle of the door leading into the corridor slipped—evidently from the hold of some one outside—back into its place, then turned again slowly, noiselessly, evilly.

She stared at the moving convex of shining brass, and [Pg 74]stepping quietly into her own room bolted the door behind her. With herself, Dolly and Ronald inside and a good door at her back it was not worth while to worry.

“You’re done up, Dolly,” she said softly. “Get into bed beside Ronald and I’ll take the sofa. I don’t want to sleep alone to-night.”

“I don’t imagine for one second that he’ll show up. If he does I’d hold my tongue, except to inform him that we’re going at once. You mustn’t tell him about Ronald.”

Magdalen gasped. If she had been a man she would have had fists first and explanations afterward in the police court. As she sat wearily on the sofa the incongruity of the whole thing came over her. The homelike room with the candle-light on Ronald’s waxen face; down-stairs the evil, scarred Chinaman; the man peering through the window. She dared think no longer, remembering the look in those pale eyes behind the glass; except that with daylight they must get away from this evil house, over the swirling firth where the tide raced like death incarnate, back to the safety of the packed streets of London town.

She had meant to keep awake, but her tired bones were too much for her. When she started up, at a loud knocking at the door of Dolly’s vacant room, it was half-past eight and broad daylight.

“Mrs. Keith,” said Dolly, utterly astounded. She [Pg 75]jumped up and hurried into her own room at the woman’s call.

A gaunt old woman in a white cap and print gown stood in the middle of Dolly’s room staring at the unused bed; a terrible old woman, but, as Magdalen had all along felt certain, an honest one.

“What capers are these?” she cried harshly. “What for did ye no’ sleep in your own bed? No wonder Sophy could na wake ye. His lordship’s here. I’m to tell you; and he’d like to see ye at once.”

“Stratharden!” cried Dolly. “Then he——” She pulled herself together viciously. “When did he come?” she asked.

“I did no’ let him in,” returned Mrs. Keith calmly, and Magdalen saw she meant to say no more. “But ye’d do well to make haste.”

“You can send Miss Clyde’s breakfast up here. She’s tired,” for Ronald could neither breakfast with Stratharden and spill egg on his pinafore, nor be left alone.

“I’ll do no such a thing,” announced the retainer. “There’s breakfast in the dining-room and she can go there. It seems to me ye’ll have queer ways when ye’ll eat alone and sleep three in a bed!” and she marched out.

“Don’t do anything. Just say we’re going away to-day. Brace up, Doll; you’re clever enough! I never saw you like this.”

“Sometimes I think I used up all my strength in London,” Dolly muttered with an odd flatness.

“No! I get on better alone with men, even with a [Pg 76]brother-in-law,” and at last there was something of the old Dolly in the way she said it.

“I want my breakfast,” Ronald announced when she was gone and he was dressed.

“So do I,” said his aunt. But as she glanced at the boy’s pallor and the unnatural circles round his eyes she had no desire to get that meal as served by Ah Lee. A quiet idea took her.

“Come,” she cried; “you and I, your lordship, will go and look for breakfast! Do you know the way to the kitchen?”

“We’re not afraid of her,” said the aunt cheerfully, and hand-in-hand with the small person who had been unwise enough to succeed to an earldom, Miss Clyde made her way through deserted passages to an enormous kitchen, where one woman sat at her breakfast, her back turned to the door, neither hearing nor seeing the intruders.

For one moment Magdalen surveyed her in silence. She was alone, and so much the better.

“Good morning, Mrs. Keith!” she cried maliciously. “I want some breakfast.”

The housekeeper bounced in her chair, turned round with an ungainly wrench, then sat gaping open-mouthed, her lean, knotted hands flung out.

It was nonsense Mrs. Keith’s pretending not to know when she had been in the house more than a month, and had been followed wherever she went for a week.

For, like a woman startled out of her senses, she was coming over to the intruders, peering at them under her bushy brows till her eyes were like green sparks. Ronald began to cry at the look on the gnarled face that was pushed so close to Magdalen’s.

“You’re frightening the child,” cried Magdalen indignantly. “You know perfectly well who I am—Lady Barnysdale’s sister. As for my name, it’s Clyde—though I can’t see how it matters to you what it is. Get me some breakfast,” she commanded, for her patience was exhausted.

“Heavens! ’tis the very speech of him!” said the housekeeper to herself. “Clyde, she says——” She put a knotted work-worn hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Speak out,” she muttered; “ye can! I’m Mrs. Keith.”

“I have spoken out.” Magdalen stamped her foot, for in this house it was waste of time to be either polite or considerate, knowing what she knew. “Now get me some breakfast. You can see for yourself I can’t take such a little child as this to breakfast with Lord Stratharden.”

“If I was wrong,” she said, “you’ll pardon me! Ye [Pg 78]have a look of one I knew that’s dead, and for the sake of him ye’ll have all that’s in this house. Though,” under her breath, and turning away, “if ye were aught to him ye’d not hold that child by the hand!”

For want of an answer Magdalen sat down on a spotless wooden chair and took Ronald on her lap.

Mrs. Keith, with that queer surprise still on her face, went to and fro awkwardly, putting such a meal on the kitchen-table as Lady Barnysdale had assuredly never seen in that house; and Magdalen’s black eyes followed her every movement. Through the open door into the dairy she saw the milk taken fresh from the pan; at her very elbow watched the boiling of the eggs, the slicing of the bacon. There might be dislike of the new Lord Barnysdale here, but there were certainly no underhand tricks with his food. To her surprise the grim old woman laid the table with fine china, not the thick crockery she had used herself.

“Ye’re served,” she said briefly; and if ever the words were welcome it was to half-starved Magdalen Clyde.

“No. I’m going back to London as soon as I can,” something beyond her control making her tell the truth as better than lies.

In silence Magdalen finished the breakfast that was putting courage into her with every mouthful, and then lifted Ronald from his chair.

“Say good morning to Mrs. Keith, boy,” she cried lightly, “and thank her for such a good breakfast!” with her lovely laugh.

“How dare you speak like that?” she cried, turning angrily on the housekeeper. “He’s a child, not three years old. It isn’t his fault that he supplanted the boy you nursed.”

“Lord Stratharden’s son,” Magdalen replied, seeing no reason for the question.

“Stratharden’s? Oh, ay!” and her eyes narrowed oddly. “He’s a guid lad enough, Buff Ogilvie. But if ye come here to teach me my duty ye’d best be going back to your own affairs.”

“I’m at them!” with a sudden inspiration. Hateful, half daft, as this old woman seemed, she was yet the one soul in the house who could be trusted even half-way. “While I think of it,” she continued boldly, “why are all the screws drawn from the bolt-sockets in her ladyship’s room?”

“Ye’ll see the same thing in a madhouse,” said Mrs. Keith, dryly, and her hearer wondered if she had ever been shut up in one. “Come ye’re ways with me,” the housekeeper went on hastily. “I’ll show ye something, and for the sake of him that ye favor I’ll tell ye something, too. I’d not be so free with your tongue in a place ye know nothing about!” Having uttered the advice she turned away.

Without answering Magdalen picked up Ronald and followed the gaunt old figure so strangely set off in a blue cotton gown. Up-stairs, through long passages, across a wide hall—where it seemed to her that her [Pg 80]guide fairly ran, and had no desire to be seen—and into a closed room that was curiously high and dark.

The housekeeper whipped a candle from somewhere and lighted it. Magdalen Clyde drew back with a startled cry.

They stood in a deserted, dismantled chapel. Over the bare, dusty altar was the despairing agony of Mary Magdalen at the foot of the cross; all else of religion was gone from the place. The windows were boarded up, the dust of years was soft on the floor—and in the dim candle-light that flickered in the close air that other Magdalen turned on the housekeeper.

“Why do you bring me here?” she demanded. “Take me away. The place smells of death.”

“It may well; it may well.” Mrs. Keith’s face was drawn and livid, and Magdalen saw suddenly that she was a very, very old woman. “I brought ye here for this—and for the look on your face!”

Magdalen wheeled. There, over the door by which they had entered, hung a second picture, facing the Mary Magdalen over the altar. And but for a something in the cut of the mouth it might have been her own face that was painted there, though the picture was not that of a woman, but of a man.

A man of five-and-twenty, with a face of burned-out sorrow; yet the eyes of it were brave still.

“That was the boy I nursed!” cried the housekeeper under her breath. “Because ye had a look of him I fed ye. And now, if ye’re wise, ye’ll get away to your home. His hair—that’s black in the painting—was the color of yours when he was a child.”

The boy Mrs. Keith nursed! Did she mean——Oh, [Pg 81]it was not Stratharden, nor never had been. Was it Dolly’s husband?

“Was he——” she began, and did not know why she stopped short. “It’s a curious chance that I should look like him!” she said with bewilderment.

“There’s no such thing as chance. We’re all born to an ending.” The words were so low and dreary that Miss Clyde looked sharply at the withered old speaker.

There were tears in the woman’s hard eyes. She brushed them away as she motioned the girl to follow her.

To Magdalen’s surprise only two short, dingy passages lay between the desolate chapel and her own room, at the door of which Mrs. Keith stopped abruptly.

“I’ll bring your luncheon to ye,” she said harshly, “if you’re meaning not to go down. And if ye’ve any wit of your own ye’ll say nothing about what I showed ye. Did ye say ye were going away from here?” she suddenly inquired.

“Oh, ay! Well, when ye’re wanting to leave ye’ll tell me!” She turned and was gone.

“Well!” Magdalen thought, staring after her, “of all the unearthly houses and people! But my black and whiteness has done me some good at last. I never thought I should get a good breakfast because I had the luck to look like a dead man’s picture. It’s a pity Dolly couldn’t get on the right side of Mrs. Keith!” But even as she thought it she knew it was impossible; it was no light hatred that had fired Mrs. Keith’s face when she looked at Ronald. And—that queer answer about the madhouse flashed suddenly clear to Magdalen. It was Dolly the woman had meant was mad!

In spite of her substantial breakfast Miss Clyde sat [Pg 82]down limply. She had thought of many things, but never of this. The pale indoor face of the man who had barred their way yesterday sprang up before her with a sudden horrid significance, and then the devilish cleverness that was at the bottom of it all turned her cold.

But it was cold rage, not cold fright, that had kept Magdalen from even hearing a foot on the floor till Dolly’s hand was on her shoulder.

“Well?” Magdalen said, and there was only curiosity in her voice. “How did you get on? What did he say?”

“Say?” she cried. “It was I that said! We’re to go to-night—to London. The horses came this morning anyhow. Magdalen,” with a sudden doubt, “I don’t know what to think about him. Before I could ask him when he arrived he said he came late last night and feared to disturb me.”

“No,” she responded not too comfortably. She had been, as she said, a failure on the stage; she knew her surprise at seeing Stratharden had been acting of the same class.

“Nothing, except what I said in my letters. I didn’t think it would do to say we’d tried to get away and couldn’t. He said it was my letter that brought him; he was anxious to see for himself that I was comfortable.”

“That we weren’t, and I didn’t think Ronald’s food agreed with him here.”

Magdalen’s face grew perfectly expressionless. Truly, Dolly must have used up all her wits in London! She had said the very last thing she should have let out she knew. If she was going to tell everything the less she knew the better; if it once dawned on her that she was here in the character of a madwoman she would do her best to behave like one.

“Why aren’t we going till to-night?” Magdalen asked. “It seems to me the ferry-boat comes here at three in the day.”

“Oh!” said the girl carelessly. If that were true it made Stratharden a liar when he said he came last night. Nothing could have got him over five miles and into a smoking-jacket by seven minutes past eight. But he must be a poor sort of villain to give in so easily and let them go. She felt strangely uneasy for a person whose trouble would be over in eight hours; it did not seem possible that a man who had gone to such pains to keep them here should let them go at the bare asking. She was so sure that all the queer things in Ardmore Castle were Stratharden’s work that she would not trust herself to see him; as for going to luncheon with him she would as soon have dined with the devil.

When Dolly would have taken Ronald to see him she called her a fool to her face. It might be their last day under Stratharden’s auspices, but, all the more, she would not let the child out of her own keeping for five minutes.

“You can go on saying he’s not well, since you’ve already admitted it,” she remarked obdurately, “and I’m packing.”

But if Stratharden kept his word, and she packed to [Pg 85]any purpose, she knew she would be pleasurably astounded.

“The carriage is here!” she cried. “Stratharden has gone on to the ferry to see us on board.”

“No. He’ll come back in the carriage and stay here a day or two. Then he’s going to Russia. Come on, and for Heaven’s sake be civil when he meets us at the boat, no matter what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she replied in perplexity, for the actual carriage at the door had knocked all her theories to bits. As for telling Mrs. Keith she was going—with an uneasy remembrance of the woman’s words—for all she knew, that might stop them. The housekeeper might be innocent about Ronald, but what she said about a madhouse had fitted in too well with the face of the man who had turned them back yesterday.

“My going away might be very different to my taking Dolly!” Magdalen thought swiftly, and with Ronald in her arms followed Dolly down-stairs.

It was odd how slowly her heart beat. It should have been thumping with joy that she was turning her back on this hateful house forever, and need never again think of Ah Lee and her dream of him, need only see his hateful face this once more as she passed by him to the carriage.

She looked over Dolly’s shoulder and saw she was spared even one more sight of the man. There was no one in the hall but James, holding the front door wide. And outside, in the seven-o’clock darkness, was a closed carriage and a pair of strong young horses pawing the gravel. At the blessed sight the girl’s black eyes were suddenly alive in her pale face.

She looked at the horses like friends; at her old acquaintance, the red-headed boy, who sat alone on the box; followed Dolly into the carriage with a laugh of pure gaiety, and fell back into her seat as James shut the carriage door behind her with a bang that made the horses start nearly out of their skins.

They were off, after all her doubts! Ardmore and its mysteries were behind them; her dream and the Chinaman off her mind forever.

“We’re going awfully fast,” said Dolly irrelevantly. “Is it down-hill?”

“The horses are fresh,” she returned comfortably. “It’s all right.” She wished she were as sure about the boat; it was queer how quickly her exultation left her.

In a little while Magdalen put her head out of the window again and caught her breath with surprise. Surely they had never come five miles. For before her was the Firth of Clyde; and black against its dark water there lay a long pier, like a pointing finger. They were at the ferry.

The horses dropped into a walk half-way out on the ramshackle pier, stopped and stood uneasily. There was no Stratharden, no ferry-boat; no sign that anyone ever came to the desolate place.

The wind whined from the hills once and again; the tide sucked at the shaky wharf; overhead it was spitting rain. To a London girl’s eyes the pier was horribly narrow. If anything frightened the horses there would be no room to turn.

“I won’t go back if I wait till daylight,” she said. “Do you think Stratharden’s done it on purpose and there won’t be any boat? Can’t you see him?”

In the deadly quiet she could have heard the lightest footstep on the pier, as she heard her own heart and the spattering rain on the carriage. Wherever Lord Stratharden was he was not here.

She got out noiselessly and stood, a darker shadow in the dark. The carriage door swung under her hand as the horses shifted restlessly in the chilly wind, the boy on the box——

“Get out!” said Magdalen suddenly, thrusting her head into the dim carriage. “Get out! Don’t speak!”

Magdalen had noted that there was something queer about the boy on the box, something terrifying in the look of him where he sat in a hunched heap, regardless of the driving rain or the horses pulling the reins through his listless fingers as they tossed and fretted at their bits.

Suddenly she could no longer distinguish him. A black rain-squall fell from the sky and shut her in, she could not see Dolly and Ronald at her elbow, or her own hand on the carriage door. By some instinct she shut it softly.

“Keep still,” she said, and felt her way round the hind wheels to wake the red-headed boy. How dared he sleep here? It was not safe, it——”

A narrow flash, strangely red for lightning, blinded her; the carriage backed and knocked her down.

“Don’t scream!” she fiercely breathed. “Hold on to my skirts and come.”

Stooping, gasping, she felt her way off that pier, its wooden coping her only guide.

The noise of wheels, of tearing hoofs, of a horse’s scream, tore the air—the latter a sound to stop the heart.

“Murder!” said Magdalen to herself as she felt solid ground under her groping hands, and stood up. “Come on.”

“The carriage is in the Clyde,” Magdalen briefly replied, “and if we’re not quiet we’ll be there, too.”

For that red flash had done more than frighten the horses; it had showed the end of the pier to Magdalen Clyde, with a stout post at each corner of it, the top of the right-hand one square and blank against the flare.

On the other post, squatting motionless, like some horrible heathen god, was the Chinese butler, waiting. For what?

“For just what he saw!” thought Magdalen with a terror that would have been unreasonable in broad daylight or in another place. “That flash wasn’t an accident. The carriage was meant to go over with us inside. The boy was drugged! Oh!”—with a sick shudder—“the poor boy! The poor horses!”

It was useless for common sense to assure her that she was all wrong; that Stratharden had for some reason not come himself to see them off, but sent the butler; and that the obvious thing to do was to call to the Chinaman, tell him how miraculously they had escaped, and go back to Ardmore till the morning. For if common sense said all this instinct clamored louder that if the man had been there to help them, he would have come over to the carriage; that if he had perched himself on the post, it was to be safe when the carriage and horses tore past him!

Trembling she cleared the rain from her face and strained eyes to the pier-end. If all were right human flesh and blood could not have kept silent when the carriage crashed into the water. Yet the Chinaman had not made a sound.

Through the dark she could see nothing; could hear only the lap of the water, the pattering rain; but through it the man might be creeping on them, step by [Pg 90]step, might have guessed the carriage was empty, might——

“Come away,” she whispered, and her lips were stone-cold. “Don’t let Ronald cry,” for the shrill child’s voice could be heard above the storm.

There was no fear of Ronald’s crying; he was nearly fainting with terror; the feel of his rigid little body in her arms made her swear to herself that for nothing on earth would she take him back to the house where they hated him.

Step by step they crept along the hillside, away from the pier; edging from one clump of grass to another, from one stunted fir to the next; since, for all they knew, their figures might be plain enough if a man had a night-glass.

Every now and then Magdalen stopped to listen to the noise of the river. They must go up-stream, not down. Anyone who wanted to make sure of wreckage would go down. Suddenly her feet felt the smoothness of a well-worn path leading downward to the water. It seemed better than aimless zigzagging on the hillside, and she followed it with Dolly treading on her heels. It came to an end on the very edge of the frith, with a sharp turn where a boulder and some low firs made a shelter from the rain.

“We can’t go on,” she whispered, feeling the turf under the trees; “it’s dry here. Sit down. Is Ronald wet?”

“No; he’s covered with my cloak.” Under the strain Dolly’s nerve had come back to her; the vicious fury of a woman who has lived by her wits was in her voice. “I’ll keep him dry somehow. He shan’t die in my arms [Pg 91]when we kept him safe in that awful house,” she fiercely added.

“They meant to murder us,” said Magdalen in a husky voice. “Did you think that flash was lightning? It was some kind of devilish firework, and it did what they meant—but it saved us, too, for I saw him!”

“No; the Chinaman. I don’t believe Stratharden ever left the house. Can’t you see now that he was at the bottom of everything? Keith was only his tool, that he lied to. He told her you were mad.”

“What do I care what he said? If it hadn’t been for you I would have stayed in the carriage,” she whispered—Dolly, who had never been grateful in her life before!

“We might just as well have stayed if Ah Lee’s at our heels,” said Magdalen grimly. “Don’t talk,” and in odd contrast to her hard voice she stooped gently and covered the huddled pair with her own heavy traveling-coat that she had stripped off in the dark. If she shivered as she tucked it round Ronald it was only half from cold.

“For we can’t stay here,” she thought. “I must do something. And I’m afraid to move or even to breathe! It’s no use to mince things, I daren’t go back to that house, even if I could find the way in the dark. Mrs. Keith might help me but she’d hang before she’d help Dolly. And if I dared go back to the pier—but I daren’t and that’s the end of it!”

“Dolly,” she said, “do you know where we are? For I don’t. All I know is that this pier isn’t the one the boat comes to at all, for I saw that one from the top of the hill one day, and there were cottages all round [Pg 92]the head of it. Do you suppose we could find our way there?”

“I don’t know. You forget I never was out of the garden but that once when the man turned us back. We can’t do anything but sit here till daylight. If the Chinaman knows we weren’t in the carriage he’ll be scouring every path. If he found us he wouldn’t dare to let us go; he’d know we knew something, and——”

“Hush!” Magdalen breathed. “Hush! I hear some one! Don’t let Ronald move.”

Magdalen leaned in the supposed direction of the sound and listened. It was all very well to think that she needed her coat less than the delicate child in Dolly’s arms, but thinking could not stop her teeth chattering. She bit fiercely into her own hand.

“It’s a boat—oars——” she muttered. “It’s——Crawl in behind the rock, between it and the fir trees—quick!” and as Dolly obeyed her she huddled herself in after, face down, a shapeless heap in the dark.

Motionless, scarcely breathing, terrified lest Ronald should wake and cry, they heard a boat crunch on the pebbly beach not three yards away.

“If it’s a fisherman,” Magdalen thought, trying to check those horrible shivers, “we’re saved! If it’s not——”

A man’s quick spring from the boat sounded loud on the stones, and in the dull grind of the keel as it was pulled up a foot or so over the pebbles, Magdalen flattened herself under the fir branches.

That quick foot on the shore was not the heavy thud of country-made boots. It was the Chinaman! They were found, they——

The girl felt he must hear those thin, crawling shivers that swept her body. She gathered herself up to spring and face him, when a slither of falling stones, an oath that was not the swearing of a foreigner, nor yet a fisherman, drew her very strength out of her.

“Where the devil’s the path?” went on the voice that, for all its irritation, was like silk. “Oh, here! The boat can go to the devil. I’ve had enough of it. I’m dirty enough to have been in ten accidents. Even Ah Lee——” and he laughed.

At the most evil sound of that laughter rage made one listener start; but the squish of the wet moss and mud under the man’s groping feet covered it.

It seemed hours before that slow tread died away; hours when it was not safe to move or breathe.

“Did you hear?” Dolly’s whisper sounded like a shriek to her. “That was Stratharden—and he laughed!”

“Well, he won’t find them. The fool has saved us. Come quick; he’s left his boat!”

With a man’s strength Magdalen lifted Dolly to her feet and got her to the beach. In the quiet the crunch of the pebbles sounded like pistol-shots as they felt their way to the boat.

“Get in,” Magdalen whispered. “Don’t stumble.” And when Dolly was seated she lifted the bow of the clumsy tub Stratharden had been good enough to leave behind him; the keel made no sound as the boat slipped out and Magdalen swung herself into the bow.

Drenched to the skin she crept to the oars, and knew she dared not row, for the noise they would make against [Pg 94]the thole-pins. Yet if she let the boat drift the current would sweep them broadside on against the pier. She crawled into the bow again and paddled desperately with one oar, knowing she could never get out into midstream, but hoping against hope.

Her strong strokes were making no difference; broadside on they were drifting down to the pier—and there was a light there!

“We’re done!” she muttered to herself, and nearly fell flat where she knelt.

The boat had fairly leaped under her, had swung round, was going out into midstream, bows on. The outgoing tide had snatched them from the shore eddy; they were flying on it like a chip or a straw. Every minute was taking them further from Stratharden, further from the island that had been their prison. Triumph shook the girl like a leaf.

When the light on the pier was but a distant star she set the oars boldly into the thole-pins and began to row.

“Where shall we go?” said Dolly feverishly. “Can’t you see any lights on the banks? We must land at the first village.”

“All right,” said her stepsister, thanking Heaven that she had learned to row on the lake at her country convent. “We’ll be in London to-morrow, Dolly,” she added cheerfully, as if in her heart she did not know she was lost on the wide black frith, and for all she knew was rowing out to sea in the cold, stinging rain that hid the shore on either hand.

The girl who sat by the fire started. That ceaseless question of all last night had been silent for the last four hours; she had thought that when Dolly had slept she would wake quite sensible.

“There’s no next,” Magdalen patiently answered just as if it were not for the twentieth time. “I rowed and rowed. Daylight finally dawned and we were close to a rocky shore. When we got out I pushed the boat out into the river and we walked. We came to a town and a station, and that’s all. You had plenty of money.”

“I know all that, you idiot!” The unexpected retort was hoarse, but unmistakably to the point. “I mean what are we going to do next? I feel awfully ill. I must have taken a chill.”

“Chill!” said Magdalen. She got up and went over to the bed. “I thought you’d got your death. You couldn’t hold your head up when we got to Euston. I had to come here and send for a doctor, and nothing he gave you would keep you quiet.”

“It was that powder he gave me,” said Dolly crossly. “Those things don’t quiet me; they only make me silly. I remember all that, and your lugging me into the Euston Hotel, and the doctor, and the awful pain in my head. Did I talk?”

“You kept saying ‘What next?’ all the time. I thought you were beginning it again,” looking at the drawn face. “Have some tea, Dolly; it’s just after lunch.”

“No. I feel sick. Oh, how sore I am! It was sitting in those wet clothes. But I kept Ronald dry,” with a laugh that hurt her.

“Dry as a bone! And I was rowing; I didn’t get chilled. I forgot how easily you took cold, and you would go straight to the train, wet clothes and all.”

“I’d had enough of Scotland,” she admitted with a shudder. “Magdalen, you didn’t write our names here—our own names, I mean?” Dolly questioned to sudden panic.

“I wrote ‘Mrs. Morton, child and maid,’ just as badly as I could. I don’t know why I did it; for it’s we who have the whip-hand now,” Magdalen musingly replied.

“Oh! Stratharden, you mean?” she said. Then, as her head ceased to swim, she continued, “I don’t know but I’m glad you didn’t write down Lady Barnysdale; it would have made me nervous; the other gives us time to think. Magdalen, I will have tea, if it’s there. I’m all right now, except that I ache all over.”

She drank the tea and lay quiet, revolving a thousand things in her mind. Some were good and some bad, but to her worn-out nerves the bad predominated. She tossed restlessly in the wide bed. The good thing was that Ronald was safe and well; her eyes fairly devoured him where he played on the floor. The bad things, or one of them, was that her cleverness seemed to have deserted her. She could not think.

“Magdalen,” she said sharply, “talk! Have you heard anything? Countesses can’t get drowned and have nothing said about it.”

“Oh, there’s been something said about it,” Magdalen observed without much spirit. “Look here.”

She brought the evening paper to the bedside and pointed to a paragraph among the telegraphic despatches.

“Read this.” Magdalen turned over to “Notes of the News,” and Dolly Barnysdale looked dull-eyed on her own name.

“Does it?” said Dolly. She dropped the paper furiously. “I’ll show him whether I’m dead or not! I’ll——” She stopped with the sentence unfinished.

The rage went from her face as if it had been wiped off. To be dead would be to be rid of Starr-Dalton. It [Pg 98]was curious how an unimportant thing like getting rid of a distasteful lover could weigh against decent punishment of or retaliation against a man who had done his best to murder her; but it did.

More than all the real terrors that had surrounded her at Ardmore Castle could do, that letter which she had said was unimportant, that was assuredly affectionate—as Mr. Starr-Dalton understood affection—had shaken Dolly Barnysdale’s nerve and paralyzed her wits.

Her brain seemed to clear in a flash. In spite of her feverish cold, her aching bones, it was the old Dolly who suddenly laughed where she sat huddled in the bedclothes. She could be a match for them both now—for Stratharden and his murderous plots, and Starr-Dalton and his hateful love-letters.

“I know now,” she said slowly, “what I’ll do. I suppose you’re all ready for lawyers and detectives and exposure.”

“What else?” said Magdalen. “It’s all plain enough. James and Mrs. Keith were told that you were crazy, and that man who turned us back was just an attendant from an asylum. The screws were out of your door-locks, so that you could be overlooked at night, and the reason we never felt alone in the garden was that we never were alone. That gamekeeper man was always following us.”

“Because I’m not a fool. I know. And the only man who was in Stratharden’s confidence was Ah Lee. It was he who drugged Ronald’s milk, for I saw him do it! I was in one of those deep windows in the corridor outside of our sitting-room door, just at tea-time that day—I found out about the postboy. I was just standing there thinking, and along came James with a tea-tray and set it down on the hall table. I thought it was ours, [Pg 99]and I was hungry, so I went to see what was on it, but it was only Ronald’s food.

“I went back to the window again to get my hat, which I’d left there, and I heard some one walking so softly that I walked softly, too. I looked out in the hall and there was Ah Lee with his back to me, putting something out of a bottle into the milk-jug. He heard James coming with the other tray before I did, and he slipped off before I could pounce on him—not toward the pantry, but up-stairs. By the time I got to the table where the milk was James was behind me with our tray. I should think these things were enough to make some fuss about! And as for the carriage—I defy them to make it out an accident. I saw Ah Lee as plainly as I see you, and you know as well as I do that it was no old pier you meant to drive to, and that Stratharden lied to you about the boat. Why on earth shouldn’t I be ready to help you show him up?”

“Are you going to stay dead?” Magdalen contemptuously asked, “because you’re afraid of a man?”

“Do you think, after all I did to be a countess, and have money, and do Ronald justice, I’m going to sit by and lose it all?”

“You’d be a fool if you did,” observed Miss Clyde, looking at Dolly with half-closed eyes that were very black, and with uncombed hair and flushed face. “But you hadn’t to do so much. Only put on a black gown and pretend a little.”

“Pretend!” Was it fancy that Dolly’s little figure grew suddenly rigid under the bedclothes?

She spoke out suddenly, just as she had done long ago in the little pink drawing-room.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “If you think it was easy to go and tell all these things about myself it wasn’t. Do you mean you think I made them up?”

“No, for I know you couldn’t. Don’t go off at a tangent, Dolly; say what you mean to do.”

Dolly’s heart knocked against her ribs like a woman who has seen a danger pass by.

“I’m tired,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “If it weren’t for Ronald I’d stay dead. I——You don’t know how hard it’s all been!”

Magdalen put a hand on the frail ones that had suddenly covered Dolly’s eyes. For the first time she saw what nervous hands Dolly had, what nervous, pointed nails. No hands for a woman who must fight her own battles. The girl looked at her own hand that was so white and hard, and a sudden compassion swept over her. It was true indeed that she must deal gently with Dolly. Of late she had been impatient and scornful enough with her. “Whatever you want I’ll do, Doll,” she said softly. It was Dolly’s eyes and not hers that were hard as she let her hands drop from under Magdalen’s.

“Look here,” she said, “if I were not the only soul on earth Ronald has to trust to I’d——” She pulled herself up sharply. “I suppose you’re saying to yourself that you’re not afraid of Stratharden?”

“That’s just the reason. We know too much. And I don’t think,” Dolly continued slowly, “that we’d be able to prove anything! I know that if Barnysdale had done what Stratharden has”—groping in the past she so seldom spoke of—“he would have done it too well to be [Pg 101]found out. He’s cast one doubt on my sanity; I think he’d only cast a great many more—and perhaps get appointed as Ronald’s guardian. We’ve got to be cleverer than that. We want to be alive and publish we’re alive; I must be able to draw my money and educate Ronald; and yet not let Stratharden know where we are—or anyone else,” she added musingly. “I’ve no desire to have any of my dear old friends hanging round me and cadging for money.”

Magdalen, sitting on the bed, was curiously graceful, and somehow every line of her was curiously hard. Dolly’s words were true enough; why did her stepsister have the old distrustful thought that she was not saying all she meant?—there was a hidden mainspring to it all.

“Easily,” said Dolly, yet she was trembling. “Only I’ve got to do it now. Get me my clothes!”

“I can; and I would if it killed me! We’ve no time to lose. I’ll get dressed, you pay the bill here, and we’ll go into the station and take a cab as if we’d just come from the train.”

“I’ll get brain fever if I lie here and think,” Dolly sharply responded. “I’m going straight to Mr. Barrow. It’s madness to be here under a made-up name.”

“You weren’t going to expose Stratharden,” Magdalen finished as if Dolly had not spoken.

“Neither I am,” said Dolly with a sudden laugh, and if her hands were frail and nervous as she hurried into her clothes they were also the insincere, unscrupulous hands of a woman who could outwit most men. “I’m [Pg 102]going to know nothing, think nothing, but that a stupid stable-boy took us to the wrong pier and we got out of the carriage just before something startled the horses and they bolted. You and I were terrified; started of course for Ardmore to get help; lost our way; found a boat, and could not row back to the castle against the stream. After which we drifted ashore and lost the train to London, where we’ve just arrived and seen the papers. Ronald was ailing and I have been so terrified that I never even remembered till I saw the account in the Star that Stratharden must be thinking us drowned. Mr. Barrow will telegraph to my anxious brother-in-law at once, and I—with my nerves horribly shaken by the whole thing, and especially by seeing my own death notice—leave to-night for Paris. It will be too late to go to the bank, so Barrow will cash a good, solid check for me—and there you are!”

“Paris!” cried Magdalen blankly. “That we don’t know at all, and Stratharden probably knows like a book. If you want to keep out of his way——”

“We won’t go there! Exactly. We’re going to stay here in London. It’s big enough,” recklessly. “I was a fool ever to leave it. Help me, Magdalen—I feel so dizzy and queer.”

“Doll, don’t do it!” she gravely begged. “I don’t like the look of it. Better tell the truth a hundred times; there’s no sense in acting a silly lie about Paris, or in pretending that you saw nothing queer at Ardmore. Speak out.”

“I won’t!” she said. “Never mind hunting for reasons. I’m ill, for one, and I want to go to bed and be [Pg 103]ill. I don’t want to have anything to do with lawyers and prosecutions and Stratharden.” She fastened her cloak and turned, with her rain-spoiled sailor hat in her hand. “All I want,” she cried with a reckless passion in her face, pointing with the crooked, warped hat to Ronald, “is to keep him safe till he’s twenty-one; to have enough to eat and drink and wear; and to rest. I’m tired; I’ve borne all I can. I’m not fit to fight—openly! You must let me manage my life in my own way.” Tired and ill Dolly had announced her intentions. The girl who looked at her saw she was more than either. An hour ago she had looked driven, hunted, desperate; now there was a triumph in her eyes as if from a dark prison she saw daylight and liberty.

There was reason enough for triumph; it is not everyone who escapes scotfree from being murdered. But it was not that which had lighted Dolly’s eyes and got her out of her bed, regardless of the bad cold that at any other time would have made her send for two doctors and declare she was dying.

“Don’t stand like a stuck pig, my good child,” she cried, “unless you want Stratharden to get to London before we’ve vanished. I know what you’re thinking; but Ronald’s my child, and the whole show’s my business. And I know,” she declared with confidence, “that I’m doing the best thing I can. Who would listen to a woman like me if I said that in a Christian country I’d been shut up by my own brother-in-law, and only escaped with my life through luck—and you?” with a moment’s softening.

“After all,” Magdalen said to herself, “Dolly’s right. It’s her business.”

Yet it was with a heavy heart that she paid the bill and followed Dolly into the station and the four-wheeler. [Pg 104]It was not by lies and hiding they would escape from Stratharden, but——

A cold suspicion gripped her and a senseless one that. She looked at Dolly’s feverish little face and held her tongue.

In a black temper he plodded through his developing, washed his hands, decided the afternoon was too gray for photographic printing, and walking out incontinently crossed Fleet Street and turned into a labyrinth of dingy thoroughfares. If his brown face were a little paler from spending his days over stuffy chemicals and his eyesight somewhat strained on retouching ugly people’s portraits, his long, light step was as usual. Half-a-dozen women glanced at the man as he passed them, with his look of being clean outside and in, of careless strength, of immaculate smartness in old blue serge clothes.

But Mr. Lovell had no eye for women, being engaged inwardly in cursing his nearest relative up in heaps. Not that he had learned anything new about him, nor heard anything tangibly annoying. But he had a perfectly involuntary trick of putting two and two together correctly; and the result to-day sickened him. So much so that as he walked he deliberately assured himself that he had imagined the whole thing—items added up and the result; after which he instantly reduced several fractions to a common denominator and did the whole thing over again.

“I wish to Heaven he’d marry again and migrate,” he thought in exasperation, and turned impatiently into a tobacconist’s and bought a handful of cigarettes. Good tobacco was wicked on a pound a week, and Mr. Lovell, to be accurate, was hungry. Also it was tea-time, and [Pg 106]for a moment there came into his mind the carnal vision of his late club, where there were comfortable chairs, hot toast and men of his own class to speak to. His mouth set hard on his extravagant cigarette.

“I’ll go back when I’ve money to go,” he said to himself grimly, “unless I find it necessary to return and put the fear of God into a fool!” and his face was so forbidding that a girl who was coming down the street almost changed her mind. For it was all very well to clear out of an unpleasant and dependent situation, but when black suspicions followed you that you were playing into some one’s hands by so doing it spelled of cowardice.

“I’m —— if it’s any business of mine!” thought Mr. Lovell angrily. “Let him hang himself;” but in his soul he knew it was not that which haunted him, but something quite Quixotic and outside the sympathy of a man who had fallen from high estate to retouching photographs.

The next second he threw a just-lighted cigarette into the street and looked straight into a girl’s eyes.

“Mr. Lovell!” said Magdalen Clyde, her cheeks a pale flame, her eyes a dark one.

The lifting of his hat, the quick throwing away of his cigarette, had been ordinary good manners; his eyes were hard as steel, his face forbidding, and she had been glad to see him, gladder than of anything else she had ever known. There was no earthly reason that he should be pleased at seeing a girl he had only met twice in his life; but all the same her shamed disappointment made her angry.

“‘A hard man with a soft manner,’” she quoted to herself involuntarily, her eyes still on a grocer’s window opposite, so that she did not see the change on Dick Lovell’s face as he looked down at her.

“It was odd, my meeting you,” she said indifferently. “I was startled. Good-by,” with a little nod that she did not know was languid any more than that her averted face was beautiful.

“Odd?” said Mr. Lovell, taking a quick step to her side as she would have walked on. “I don’t know—I suppose so,” without a glimmer of just how odd it was. “It’s a great pleasure at all events. I had no idea you were even in town.”

In Scotland, in a bad place, it had seemed so sure that this man was a friend; here and now she knew the thought had been the thought of a fool. She and Dolly, masquerading, could not dare to have friends picked up at random. In the waning light she turned, her face repellant, her eyes cold. She was worrying over unhatched chickens; Mr. Lovell had made no sign of either friendliness or pleasure at seeing her.

The sudden, sweet light in the eyes she met sent the blood to her face. She stood for one breathless instant stock-still, three times more beautiful than he had even dreamed, and all Dick Lovell’s uneasy thoughts were gone at the lovely sight.

“I feel as if you’d waked me from a bad dream,” he said slowly. “Do you know for a moment I could scarcely believe my eyes?”

“I know you terrified me,” observed Miss Clyde, marching on with a queer feeling that she must get away from his eyes if she were wise. “I never in my life saw [Pg 108]anyone look more bad-tempered than you did when I spoke to you.”

“Was that why you wouldn’t look at me?” he said boyishly. “I’ve been in a black rage all day; more fool I! Are you going anywhere in particular?” with a sudden knowledge that she meant to dismiss him, and as sudden a determination that he would not submit to it.

“So am I,” he calmly remarked. “I was going to have tea there. I wonder—if you——” he stammered. Lovell, who had been the best-beloved and worst-spoiled man in town, stammering at asking a girl to have tea!

A hundred thoughts went through Magdalen’s head before she answered. She was tired out, lonely; why should she never be happy because of Dolly’s cares? She threw the whole bundle of them aside and answered the half-finished question demurely:

In Lovell’s pocket was the change those cigarettes had left from ten shillings; his eyes smiled into hers with the reckless consciousness of wealth.

“There shall be,” he averred, and he also cast a black care behind him as they entered the little shop where the coffee was wonderful and the tea weird.

Lovell, as he gave an order to the white-capped man behind the counter, did not notice his companion pause and look back into the dingy street. She made a little self-contemptuous movement, as no one of the passers-by so much as glanced at Dufour’s.

It must have been fancy that ever since she stopped to speak to Lovell some one had never let her get out of sight.

“I’m getting to be an awful fool,” the girl reflected [Pg 109]swiftly. “This hole-and-corner business of Doll’s, and her eternal cautions, are making me nervous. We’re all right; we’ve sunk in London like stones till I met him to-day. I don’t know why I’m so stupid; it was all so much easier and quicker than I thought. It all went swimmingly.”

It certainly had. At three o’clock one day three weeks ago “Mrs. Morton, child and maid” had departed from the Euston Hotel; at five Lady Barnysdale—after nearly frightening Mr. Barrow into a fit by her appearance, when he had just wired diplomatic condolences on her death to Lord Stratharden—had left the lawyer’s office for Charing Cross and Paris, with a hundred pounds in her pocket; at seven Mrs. Morton and party had reappeared again at a modest hotel, the poorer by the price of unused tickets to Paris, and Dolly had gone to bed and stayed there for a week, after which she had emerged quite recovered and gayer than the gay, had boldly gone out, trusting in a thick crepe veil and a plausible tongue, and taken the upper part of a house in Hare Street.

To the vacating tenant, a milliner, she gave an extra ten pounds for leaving her plate on the door, which was easily earned money to that lady, who was retiring in disgust from a phantom business. It was, therefore, from behind the neglected door-plate and the respectable blinds of “Madame Aline, Robes and Modes,” that Miss Magdalen Clyde had come out to-day in search of French bread; come out with an eye at every corner and a firm determination to take to her heels at the sight of the most innocuous Chinaman in London, and ended in Dufour’s shop, with a dismissal of all her nervous tremblings and groundless fears because a man’s hawk eyes were the eyes of a comrade as he came back to her side.

“I ordered coffee,” said Lovell, and perhaps he had no idea what a pleasant voice he had, nor what a tower of strength he looked in his worn blue serge. “Their tea is horrible, but the little hot cakes!” and he laughed as he stood back to let her pass into Mr. Dufour’s respectable family tea-room.

To his surprise “the girl whose name was Magdalen” sat down at the little marble table with undisguised fatigue. He wondered swiftly who and what she was. His quick glance took in her smart black gown, her chinchilla furs, the immaculate dressing of her lovely rust-colored hair, her long, white hands as she took off her gloves. The left one was no business of his, but a senseless pleasure made him smile as he looked at it. Whoever she was she was nobody’s wife; Mr. Lovell had no leaning toward other people’s property.

That she was a lady he did not even say to himself; it was too evident. No one who put on make-up every night could have that sort of skin; she was not an actress. Yet, somehow, she did not look like a girl who did nothing; he was pretty certain that care and responsibility fell on those shoulders; for every line of her was tired and lax in Mr. Dufour’s hard chair; and yet she looked anything but poor.

That a girl he had met in Krug’s half-caste restaurant without benefit of introduction, had followed it up by making no bones about coming to tea with him, never entered the man’s head. The very look of her told him there was never a girl in the world more unconscious of her strange beauty than she.

“This isn’t a very grand place to bring you to,” he said with a sudden consciousness that, for all he knew, she might be used to Prince’s Restaurant. “But it’s quiet.”

“Yes,” she said simply. She looked straight at him. “I suppose I should not have come,” she observed calmly; “but I wanted to. I was tired. We have just found new quarters—my sister and I. And—did you ever move?” she suddenly and tragically inquired.

“I did. But as I had only myself and some clothes it was not fatiguing,” rather grimly, remembering the house from which he had departed in haste. “You look as if your removal had been tiresome. Will you pour out the coffee, or shall I?”

“You,” with the smile that made her lovely. “I don’t do those things well.”

“Non-sense!” said Lovell with a drawling sweetness that made the curt word civil.

In complete happiness, such as neither had ever tasted in their lives, the two sat at their little table. If for a moment the ghosts of the many rebukes she had given with some point to Dolly, on the subject of going to tea with unknown men, arose before Magdalen Clyde, she put them behind her with determination. Dolly’s men and this man were not alike; and for once she would let herself go, be young and gay and happy like other girls, with no silly hiding to worry them. As for Lovell, he was like a lost dog who has suddenly got home. No one would ever have said he was grave and unhappy to-day.

The economical soul of Mr. Dufour had not lighted the gas in his tea-room, which was getting dusky. With his hand on the matches, he glanced with pleased sympathy at the two who took their coffee so gaily, and were so appreciative of his hot cakes; glanced back at his shop window, and drew a curtain noiselessly over the tea-room door.

M. Dufour, where a pretty woman was concerned, was a man of impulse, to his own mind one of great insight; and——

He was putting cakes on a tray deliberately as a man entered his shop. If M. Dufour had not liked his looks from outside he liked them still less from in.

“The fat and furious husband!” said he to himself, with his best shop smile. He did not move from his place by the tea-room door.

The man laughed. If his manner meant to be pleasant it was not. M. Dufour observed that utter silence reigned in his tea-room.

“Good food for women,” the new visitor returned patronizingly. “No; let me have a light, will you? By the way, did a lady come in here half an hour ago?”

“Several, monsieur.” M. Dufour’s box of matches was obsequiously held out on a tray.

“I did not observe,” he said with a shrug, “any red hair. One tall lady arrived and has just departed through that door,” with a slighting wave of his hand to his back entrance.

“You’ve a tea-room,” the visitor bluntly remarked in spite of a thick-lipped smile. “I’ll have tea.”

“I regret it is impossible,” said the Frenchman smoothly. “My tea-room is to-day closed. My wife is indisposed.”

He was too clever to give the man any idea that he was lying; he began, apologetically, to recommend his little cakes. But it was to empty air.

The unwelcome customer—who had not paid for his [Pg 113]box of matches—had left the shop by the little-used back door.

To the proprietor’s eyes rose the bland light of the successful diplomatist. The denied tea was of course a loss to business, but what M. Dufour had begun to oblige his old customer, M. Lovell, he had finished for personal dislike of a disagreeable man. He did not grudge his sixpence thrown away.

“Also, I can charge extra for the coffee!” he thought with a pleasant consciousness of having done a kind and tactful action.

It was a pity he could not have seen the reason for the sudden silence in the tea-room. Magdalen, sitting very straight, had held up a warning hand and sat listening. There was no mistaking Starr-Dalton’s voice; it was odd that he had been in her thought all day.

“Did you hear?” she said. “That man was looking for me. He used to come to see us, and we hated him. We didn’t mean him to know we were in London.”

There was careless scorn in her face, but there was also the cold, intuitive hatred many a girl has for a bad man.

Lovell regarded her in silence. Whoever and whatever she was, there was nothing milk-and-water about her.

“He shan’t know now if you don’t want him to,” he said. “You’re not going because of him?” for she had risen.

Starr-Dalton was neither here nor there to her; it was not he who could shatter the dream of peace that had come to her; the time was gone by when she must [Pg 114]be civil to him for the sake of borrowed money; she could afford to be angry at his insolence in dogging her.

“I won’t have it,” she thought. “He shan’t follow me home and find Dolly. I’ll drive,” but even as she thought her face fell; she had only sixpence; a hansom was impossible, and to walk might mean running into Starr-Dalton at the first corner.

“Ready?” said he simply. “I’m going to take you home in a hansom if I may.”

At the modest door where Madame Aline’s door-plate shone meagerly in the gaslight she turned to him.

“You’ve been very kind,” she said a little uncomfortably, “and you don’t even know my name”—for “Madame Aline’s sister” had not thought of one, and did not dare to make one up on the spur of the moment.

“No.” Mr. Lovell perhaps helped her out with some haste. “I know—that is—Madame Aline is quite enough for me!” with a glance at the tarnished sign.

But when she had gone in and the hansom had driven off he put the two shillings that remained to him into his pocket and laughed. Her name had been settled for him long ago.

“Good-night, Dark Magdalen,” said he to a shut door, and lifted his hat as he turned away.

Up and down the empty corridors of an empty house Mrs. Keith walked, gaunt and old. Never in all her seventy years had it come home to her that Ardmore Castle was an eery house when the rain rained every day and the wind whined through the long nights, but she knew it now.

“Soft David” sat by the kitchen fire caring for nothing but his meals; in the maid’s room Sophy and Grizel were cheerful in a Scotch and sour way, but the housekeeper could take no rest. Something that she had never spoken of had shaken her nerve, for her old eyes grew fiercer every day as she went on those needless errands through the silent house.

Stratharden and his men had gone, after being interrupted in their useless search of Clyde waters by that telegram from Mr. Barrow, which for a second time snatched the bread from a needy man’s mouth.

Perhaps he was too busy in keeping a decent pleasure on his own face to notice other people’s; he did not see the sudden twitch of the housekeeper’s hard old mouth as she heard in silence that the usurpers of Ardmore were better employed than in tossing drowned and stark in the Clyde. It was queer that as the days ran on to weeks a restlessness grew on the old woman.

It took her day after day to watch for the post-boy, who never came. Her restlessness led her everywhere in the house but into the locked-up chapel, where no step but hers had been these twenty years gone. Perhaps she did not know herself what she expected, nor why [Pg 116]she could not sleep at night for thinking of the dead, but when one day the big bell of the front door rang in the silence of twilight, the old blood leaped in her worn-out veins.

“Bide where ye are!” she cried fiercely to Sophy, and ran past her, a gaunt, ungainly figure in her clean cotton gown.

Her hand shook on the door-handle as she turned the key; but when the door stood wide it was steady as stone and colder.

“Were you all asleep?” said he with that smile which was not smiling. “I’ve nearly rung the house down.” He could not see her face as he stepped into the cold, dark house, nor did he think of looking at it.

“Ye were not expected, Stratharden,” and if the words were apologetic the tone was not. “Yer bed’ll not be aired.”

“Oh, air it, then, and don’t talk!” said the man with a sudden irritation not usual to him; but the next instant his voice and manner were his own again and smooth as silk. “My dear woman I’m tired and anxious, that’s why I’m here. Get me some dinner like a good soul, and then I’ll talk to you. I assure you I’m worn out.”

“Ye’re looking well,” she dryly returned in the way he had known since childhood.

She walked before him and knelt with cracking joints to light the fire that was already laid in the dining-room. But the air of the deserted room struck chill to Lord Stratharden’s bones.

“I’ll come to your room till this is habitable,” he said urbanely. “I’m sure you keep yourself warmer than this.”

“At your pleasure,” was all she said, but he was used to her hard speech and had not expected better. Armed [Pg 117]neutrality had reigned between the two for twenty years, except for that brief time when they had combined against a common foe.

“Hard old devil!” said Lord Stratharden to himself, as he sat down in her comfortable sitting-room. “She’d have let me freeze rather than offer it. But she is a very faithful, well-meaning woman.” He smiled to himself and said it over again as if it pleased him.

When she had finished serving his dinner—and if Dolly had been half-starved, Stratharden was scrupulously well fed—he stopped her as she put the decanter in front of him before leaving the room. The old woman was too well used to him to notice that he would have been a good-looking man, for all his forty-five years, if he could have learned to keep his crooked eyebrows quiet in an otherwise impassive face. One was lifted higher than the other now as he turned round in his chair to her.

“No, I didn’t.” He looked at the port in his glass, tasted it, put it down again. “In fact, I should have been surprised if you had. But Lady Barnysdale—I may as well tell you—is not in Paris, never has been there. I am more troubled than I can say.”

“How do I know?” he responded. “You take your orders from Lady Barnysdale, not me.”

It never occurred to Stratharden to look for the root of the contemptuous fling.

“I suppose it isn’t in nature that you should like it,” he said kindly, “but till Lady Barnysdale does something mad, before all the world, you can’t call anyone else mistress here. No woman in her senses would have gone off to London without so much as letting us know she was safe, nor have seen fit to disappear ever since, by pretending to go to Paris. I don’t know what to do. For all I know it isn’t safe to leave the little boy in her care. I ought, in all prudence, to know at least where she is.”

Mrs. Keith sat in open, unalloyed indifference. Lady Barnysdale, with her furious rages, her flighty speech, which the old Scotch woman thought indecent and unintelligible, had borne out Stratharden’s warnings about her well enough; her attempt to escape from Ardmore in her best widow’s weeds on a wet day would have clinched them, had it been needed. Mad or sane, she cared not a jot about Lady Barnysdale, but for some reason she did not say so.

“Ye can find out,” said she coolly. He could not dream her gnarled hands were clasped hard under her apron as she waited for him to answer.

“Unfortunately I cannot personally!” and she saw the uncontrolled rage in his eyes. “I have to go away, out of England, on business.”

“I always said ye were a fool to traffic with the Jews,” she dryly remarked.

Her apt guess at the cold truth made him laugh, as another man would have sworn. There was not a man in England that night more embarrassed than Lord Stratharden.

“Let that be,” said he softly. “Some one has to find Lady Barnysdale, and I can’t do it.”

“Just that—he’s a heathen—and people look at him when he walks in the street. Look here, Keith—in common [Pg 119]humanity that woman must be found and looked after. You remember how we had to watch her here.”

“Just what I’ve said. Lady Barnysdale, to my knowledge and belief, is as irresponsible as a child. I have to go away, but I ought to know at least where Barnysdale’s son is—and I want you to go to London and find out.”

“And policemen on the street corners. I want neither. You’re faithful, if you do care more for the name than for me; you know London——”

A dull red burned to the woman’s cheek; she had reason to know London, but it was not Stratharden who should tell her so.

“Would ye have me knock at every door in the place and inquire if my Lady Barnysdale is within?” she wrathfully cried.

“I want you to take a lodging opposite the bank she must go to for her money,” he said, with a sudden savage earnestness. “I’m certain she’s in London, in spite of that fool Barrow. And she’ll have to have money. If I know her sort, a hundred pounds won’t last her long. And now you can take it or leave it. I’ll pay your expenses and wages, besides what you’re getting, and all you’ll do for them will be to sit at your window in banking hours and wait till she goes in. Then you can take a cab, follow her home, and telegraph to me where she is. Then you can take the first train for home. For the honor of the name, that boy must be taken care of.”

“And supposing she does not go herself? How long will I be in London then? She’d a sister that I never laid eyes on but once,” she musingly remarked. “Maybe she’d go in and out before my eyes and I not know her—but that she’d dark hair.”

“Dark? You’re dreaming! Dull-red, that doesn’t grow on every bush. And tall—you’d know her.”

“She had her back to me. Why the devil do you harp on her? If you won’t go, say so. I suppose Ah Lee can look through a window as well as you.”

Ah, he did not know how the words had made an old and savage score against him leap to life.

Lord Stratharden leaned back in his chair as if he were suddenly tired. He had, in very truth, no one to send on his philanthropic errand but this old woman. Without James he could not hope to leave England, and leave he must; and he had no desire that Ah Lee, suavely and conspicuously exotic, should do what an elderly Scotch woman could do unnoticed.

“Thank you, Keith,” he said. “Here is your money.” And truly it was hard-earned and ill-spared.

“I’ve never failed the house, my lord,” said she. “But I’ll take no wages for doing your work. I’m well paid. And where will I let ye know when I find the lady?”

“No, not Buff! And if you see him, the thing is no concern of his,” casually. “But you’d better take the money.”

“Ye’ll not be too throng of it there!” she returned, with a cool glance at the card.

“I’ll take no blood-money for the work I’ll do for the house of Barnysdale,” she said, under her breath. “And I’ll do my work well.”

Aunt Manette sat alone in her neat room at her eternal knitting. If her blind eyes could not see the comfort of her glowing coal fire and her shining lamp, perhaps she felt it, for night after night she sat between them, as women do who can see. There was a curious, dull depression on her clear-cut old face to-night; even her knitting-needles moved slowly. There was no sense in the work; when it was done, she did not need the money; no sense in her life that from her third-story room in Hare’s Rents was one interminable, helpless search after the lost things of this world.

“I’m old,” she thought to herself, with a sudden sick tremor. “Old; and I’ll die alone, with it all undone;” for, in plain words, the man who had patiently done her work for her had given it up to-day. She did not know where to turn for another who could be trusted to be eyes to the blind.

“But I’ll find one,” she thought, with an ugly gentleness that her fingers copied in their slowing knitting. “If I’ve time,” and she laughed.

There was time in plenty, if nothing else, for a woman who sat her days out in blindness. A sound on the stairs made her lift her head, lean forward to listen, as blind people do. She put down her knitting with a curiously dainty gesture for a woman who lived in Hare’s Rents, and pulled the string that opened her door. The steps came closer and paused in the flood of cheerful light from the narrow doorway.

“What!” cried a voice, and the low, rich note of it [Pg 123]struck pleasantly on the woman’s ears. “Sitting idle, Aunt Manette? Upon my honor, you’re degenerating. You’ll be getting quite human next.”

Aunt Manette breathed through her nose; from the hall came a scent that brought back a thousand things. She crossed the room briskly and laid her small hand on the man’s arm unerringly, without effort.

“I was waiting for you!” she cried—though she had never given him a thought. “Come in, my friend! I had the spleen. I said to myself, ‘I will make a little festival for my photographer and me.’”

“That is just what you would not let me be!” said he smiling. “But am I really to come in?” Compared to his dreary bedroom up-stairs, this room, full of firelight, of blossoming flowers, was like another world.

“Oh, yes! Have I not waited?” she composedly asked. “Never mind the door; you cannot shut it.”

She moved to her chair as lightly as a girl and undid the stout cord twisted round a knob on the arm.

“So that’s how you do it—and sit still!” said Lovell laughingly. “It’s clever, Aunt Manette,” and he looked at the cord that ran round the wall on two pulleys.

“Not clever, but useful,” observed his hostess, rather dryly. “Sit down, monsieur.”

For a moment he could not rid himself of the idea that she could see him, for she stood as if thinking, her bright brown eyes full on his face. But she turned away with that pathetic groping movement of the blind which she so seldom allowed herself.

“Let me,” he cried, jumping up, as she took a shining white table-cloth from a chair.

“You would confuse me,” she said laughing. “I have not the eyes to oversee a clumsy young man.” With that [Pg 124]curious seeing glance at him that was but the remnants of an old habit when the eyes of Manette Duplessis had never missed their man.

Without a mistake or hesitation she laid her table for two, produced from a cupboard a bottle, of which the seal made Lovell’s eyes open, and went to her brick hearth. A pot stood there, and, as she lifted its cover, the odor of it was more suited to a prince’s kitchen than a room in Hare’s Rents.

“To ruin it! No, no; you help yourself from my pot—so!” and she deftly twisted a napkin round the earthenware jar. “A French dish,” she said; “and you are English. But you will not wish it were roast beef.”

A French dish! He saw with wonder as she helped him that it was something even few French cooks make. Pheasant, boned and filleted, cooked in Madeira with mushrooms, truffles, numerous things that were not cheap. As he took up his fork he saw it was silver, with a crest on it; and because his hostess could not see him do it, did not look at the device.

“A poor feast, this,” said Aunt Manette, gaily as a girl. “But the main dish I made myself.”

“The secret,” she went on gravely, “is to keep the cover tight with a seal of paste. Oh, I can cook many things, Mr. Lovell. To eat well is an art. It keeps the blood young.”

And young she looked as she sat opposite him, her face smooth under her nunlike head-dress, her hands white and fine. He wondered somehow that anyone so clever as she looked could be so kind, and to an acquaintance who had begun by unwittingly annoying her.

It never struck him that her invitation had been pure selfishness. Her thoughts had been heavy, hopeless; [Pg 125]though she would not think so. And he was a gentleman, of a class she seldom came in contact with; was young; he would distract her with his talk, cheer her with his company, which was cheap at the price of some pheasant and a bottle of wine. She was more interested, too, than she had imagined possible. Her keen sense felt there was a change to-night in the man. His step, that was always light, had been gay as he ran up the stairs, when she waylaid him. She held up her glass of red wine with a gesture foreign enough to Hare’s Rents.

Lovell leaned forward and touched her glass with his, but there was surprise in his face.

“You told me,” with a smile. “You come up-stairs three steps at a time—from work that you dislike! You stop to call me idle, who have before begged me to rest; and—it was very extravagant tobacco, Mr. Lovell!” she gravely declared.

He laughed, throwing back his handsome head in a way many women had loved who were not blind. His whole face lit into sweetness as he looked at her. Perhaps she felt it, for she wished for the first time that she could see him.

“The tobacco was before the luck,” he said, “so you’re out in your sorcery. But it’s been all luck to-day. I was going to dine on a baked potato when you asked me to dine here. But I’d better go—since I reek of Turkish tobacco!”

“Egyptian,” she corrected. She got up and brought over a brass coffee-pot from the brick hob. “On the contrary, you will smoke more of it—here! And you will prepare a cigarette for an old woman.”

If Mr. Lovell was surprised he did not show it. He saw her go back to her big chair and draw slowly, daintily, at the cigarette he lighted for her, and saw that the scent of it made her face soft, as if it brought back her youth. But he did not see that to smoke a cigarette like this was to let herself remember that youth was dead—and fruitless. She broke the silence suddenly.

“Was it the tobacco or the good luck that reduced your pocket to a naked potato?” she asked.

“It is always the tobacco!” returning the glance he eternally forgot was blind.

“But tell me of her—your good luck; is she beautiful? But, of course, since I shall see her only in your thoughts of her,” not without sarcasm. “Fair and small and blond, since you are brown-skinned and tall.”

“How do I know how you look? Oh, you need not beg my pardon! It is not a secret that I am blind. You have a pleasant voice, you walk easily, with long legs—not quick, quiet, like the short. That is simple enough. But now about your good luck—who is not fair?”

The man stared at the fire. Old, lonely and blind, there was no reason he should not tell her all she cared to know. That an old woman—with a history—who had come down—for some reason that was not poverty—to Hare’s Rents—should praise her beauty, could not hurt Dark Magdalen.

“I can hardly tell you what she’s like,” he said slowly. “It sounds so strange, so ugly, if you have not seen her. She is tall, she has a graceful neck—long, round, with a curve.”

“Oh,” he said rather desperately. “I can’t tell you very well. She’s tall and slim, and strong; but you don’t [Pg 127]think of that, because she has an indescribable kind of grace. And she’s black and white and red.”

“Apple cheeks!” he laughed out. “Good Heavens, Aunt Manette, I didn’t mean she had red cheeks! She’s white, dead-white, with the blackest eyes and eyebrows I ever saw. All the red of her is in her hair; and that’s not red, either, but dull—almost the color of rusty iron.”

Aunt Manette said one word in French. It might have been anything, but it was so low that Lovell never noticed it. She turned her indifferent face away a fraction.

“No, not dark-chestnut at all. Duller, richer—you could not know unless you saw her.”

“I shall see on the judgment day, in the afternoon,” she cried, with sudden, fierce profanity. “Bah! Go on. Never mind my feelings; you have not hurt them. The make of her face, her features?” Under her black gown her foot tapped hard on the floor.

“Curious,” he said, shutting his eyes to bring that face up on a black swimming background. “Very delicate and very strong, like a profile on a coin; cut in a little at the sides of the chin; a mouth perfectly brave, perfectly generous; a little too firm—for a woman.”

Aunt Manette got up, almost feebly. The next minute a cold breath rushed through the room from the window she had flung up. Her voice came back a little uncertainly as she leaned out.

“A strong cigarette when one is unaccustomed to the habit,” she said. “You will forgive me?” She closed the window and came back to her seat; certainly she was pale.

“I’ve tired you,” Lovell said contritely. “Wouldn’t you like me to go?”

Go! She would have stuck a knife into him sooner than let him go now. She laughed rather sharply.

“No, no!” she said. “I forget that one should only do foolish things when one is young. I like to hear you talk. I——”—her face was strangely pathetic—“would you, M. Lovell, tell a woman who is but a blind old wreck and cannot leave her own four walls, the name of that girl who is black and white and red?”

“The only name she has, to my knowledge,” he said softly, “is Magdalen—Dark Magdalen.”

“No,” he abruptly cut in. “She’s a lady; she makes dresses, or hats, or something. Her name is Magdalen. She has ‘Madame Aline’ on her door-plate, and that’s all I know about her.”

“The name,” she said, “frightened me. And do you go to see her, this lady who makes hats in Bond Street?”

There was something so wistfully kind in her blind face that Lovell said something he had not meant to.

“She doesn’t live in Bond Street; she lives just round the corner, in this very block of buildings. That’s part of my luck.”

“But,” the old woman was bewildered; “this building, so poor, so—who would come here for hats?”

“I forgot you couldn’t know,” he gently explained. “It is like this, Aunt Manette. Our side of the buildings is un-get-at-able, except through that dirty lane. No one would take the rooms, they tell me, so they let them to poor people cheaply. We live on the west side; you go [Pg 129]out round the corner to the north side, which is better than this; the east side, where she lives, has shops underneath and offices and flats above. It is as if it were twenty miles from our side.”

“I don’t know.” Lovell rose, for his hostess was leaning back wearily. “Good night, Aunt Manette,” he said, with that graceful manner she could not see.

“You will come again, of your good heart,” she said gently. “It is a good deed to the blind.”

When he was gone she sat for a long time without moving, till suddenly she cried out in a kind of passion.

“A lucky, lucky star, but not yours, my photographer! And yet—why should I think it? It will go like the rest. Oh!”—and uncertainty caught her brave old heart and tore it—“Oh, this Dark Magdalen that I cannot see.”

For a woman come to London on Lord Stratharden’s unselfish business, Mrs. Keith behaved peculiarly, and according to no one’s lights but her own.

She took a lodging opposite the Court Street branch of the London and Provincial Bank, certainly, but she was seldom in it, and never once looked out of the window. There was plenty of time for that, though if Stratharden had been in England she might not have thought so. But his lordship was tightly and financially tied up at Ostend, and likely to be so till kingdom come. Mrs. Keith did not take him into her calculations at all.

She went her way to Mr. Barrow’s office at a time when he was certain not to be there—and interviewed his head clerk, a Scotchman and an old friend. The two—who were reticent enough to the outside world—unbent in cheerful conversation; Mr. Fleming had not spent so pleasant an hour for many a day. But when Mrs. Keith left the office, a respectable, unnoticed old person in decent black, her face changed.

“The devil’s in playhouses,” said she, “but I doubt I’m over old to be affected,” and she stopped an omnibus. Two addresses had Mr. Fleming let fall in the joy of conversing in broad Scotch; Mrs. Keith, who “knew London,” proceeded to both of them by bus. It took some time, but it was her own money she was spending; and time was more plenty than it was.

When she got home to her lodgings she was worn out. She sat over her tea as if she could not rouse herself.

“I’ve spent ninepence on gadding,” she said to herself, bringing her hard fist down on the table, “and all I’ve found out is that the daft, flighty body Barnysdale married never had any sister. The manager man, with his smirks, was sure about that. ‘Miss Dorothy Deane,’” with a mincing imitation like anything on earth but her model, “‘was quite alone in the world. He remembered her perfectly, since she had never been employed anywhere but at his theater. He had been delighted to hear she had done so well for herself. Of course, when she married no one had any idea that she had married an earl. She was a pretty little thing, with her fair hair, and was very popular at the theater. It had always been a marvel to him that she did not return to the stage. That was a lucky escape she had had, by the way, from that terrible carriage accident.’”

Sentence by sentence Mrs. Keith went over all the information she had gained, and found it wanting.

“It’s not Dorothy Deane,” and she sniffed contemptuously, “that I’m wanting. It’s a woman named Duplessis. You can’t climb a tree from the top. I’ll begin at the weary old root again. Her name was Ninon Duplessis, and she’s been dead fifteen years. I’ll write it down. I’m not good at saying it the way he did.”

She finished her tea deliberately, and got out ink and paper. When she was done, it was a curious document her knotted old fingers had written. She blotted the last wet lines of it on clean white blotting paper, and put it in her petticoat pocket.

“That’ll make it clear to him,” said she contentedly, “when it’s time to go to the prying man. But that’s not yet. First, I’ll put my finger—and that’s not Stratharden’s—on my Lady Barnysdale!” And at the look of [Pg 132]her Dolly might have shaken in her shoes. There was no pity for her or Ronald in Mrs. Keith.

During the next day or two she went about in queer places, but she might as well have stayed at home. She came on nothing, met the same old stumbling-blocks that had tripped her fifteen years ago. When the week was out it might have edified Lord Stratharden to see the faithful Keith seated all day long at her second-floor window, even if he were not pleased that her spectacles raked the street in vain.

“I’ll take the air,” she thought one fine morning, being cramped to death from the inactive life. “I’ll be back before the bank opens,” and it was odd that she had not cared when first she came to London how many times Lady Barnysdale might have got money without her knowledge, while now she watched for her as if life and death depended on it. But at a quarter to nine in the morning the most zealous watch would be wasted. Mrs. Keith put on her unornamental bonnet and went out.

When, on the stroke of ten, she returned, she stood aghast and indignant on her threshold. A man sat by the table, perfectly at home, for his strong cigar made even Keith cough.

“Get out of my room, ye——” she began furiously, when he turned his face to her. Strong old woman as she was, she leaned against the door-post.

“Stratharden!” she cried, and would sooner have seen the devil. “How came ye here?”

“To see how you’re getting on”—to her startled senses his voice was ominously smooth—“and to help you. Come in, my good soul, and shut the door! This isn’t Ardmore Castle.”

“Ye terrified me,” said she grimly. “Have ye no [Pg 133]sense better than to come where they might jail ye for debt?” and she shut the door before she said it.

“Might have—not might,” corrected his lordship. “I’m a free man, Keith; I needn’t trouble you any longer. My debts are paid, at least enough to whitewash me.”

“It was not them that lent the money I was meaning,” she responded significantly, but the next minute she wished with late wisdom that she had held her tongue. There was something she did not like in her visitor’s manners; she looked at him angrily, and spoke to cover her foolish fling at him, in a sudden, dreadful uneasiness that he might know what it meant.

“Think of it, Stratharden!” she cried. “Can ye not see ye’ll be in bondage to her for that paying of yer debts? And that money—I’d have seen ye in jail before ye’d borrowed it!”

“You’re a Presbyterian, my faithful Keith,” returned the man lazily. “And now, having borrowed, and being out of jail, I’ll let you go home, and I’ll find out my poor little sister-in-law by myself. I’m afraid you’re a poor detective; but you think it underhand work I dare say.”

Mrs. Keith’s hand was on her pocket; but the folded paper was there. She executed a nimble flank movement and established herself fair and square in the window.

“If you mean I’ve been neglecting my orders,” she said sturdily, “I haven’t. There’s been no Lady Barnysdale at that bank yet. Would ye have me sit here at five in the morning? I was out, but ye saw me come back ere they opened their doors.”

He could not see that she was looking up and down the street in an agony of terror. Fool that she had been to let things take their course, to trust to time. She [Pg 134]should have ransacked all London, have had her finished business in her hand to meet him with. Blood and bone she knew Stratharden, and there was that in his soft manner that told her that he had been too sharp for her. What should she do, if this day, of all days, Lady Barnysdale should come to the bank? She threw the window up and leaned out.

“You’re a zealous, faithful creature, Keith!” observed his lordship kindly. “But I shan’t need you any more. I dare say you’ll be glad to get back to Davie.”

The paper in the old woman’s pocket crackled as she leaned against the window-sill, and the sound of it did her good. “He was always like that,” she reflected, “as if he knew something you did not want known,” but there was something he could not know while that paper was safe in her pocket. If only Lady Barnysdale did not come to the bank this morning! And for a woman who had a contemptuous hatred for another, it was odd that Mrs. Keith prayed, standing, that she might not so come; odder, too, that, like a woman in agony, she only knew she prayed, and not that all her prayer was one sentence over and over, and that from no Presbyterian petition.

“You’ll strain your eyes out, Keith,” observed the kind Stratharden. “And my poor little sister-in-law, who was terrified of you, could see you yards away. Give me your place!”

“Good Lord, deliver us! Good Lord, deliver us!” If a mind can jabber, hers did it then. But she never moved.

There was a hired brougham coming down the street. She knew, like a woman possessed, who was in it. And Stratharden sat still behind her. If she faced him she might keep him there, but never long enough, never.

“Ye’re very anxious for one that’s no fool, Stratharden,” [Pg 135]said she acridly. “I’ll draw back from the window when it’s time I should not be seen there.”

Was he moving? She dared not look to see, so fast was that brougham coming down the street.

“Good Lord, deliver us!” she thought faster than ever. Her stiff old arm was bent from the elbow close against her breast; she dared not fling it out, dared not call. But her hand Stratharden could not see. She motioned with it from the wrist, frantically; her body between it and Stratharden, her arm and shoulder still; caught a look from black eyes in the brougham window, pointed again with her gnarled fingers, and saw a hand fall from the unpulled check-string.

Stratharden’s hand fell on her shoulder; she hardly felt it, yet somehow it had thrust her aside like a reed.

There was fury and triumph in her eyes as she watched his apparently unconscious, careless gesture, and the next second a startling suspicion aroused her.

“So you’ve a friend with black eyes,” he said. “You seem exhausted, Keith; you don’t look well. Come with me, and we’ll take your ticket for home. There’s a train at twelve.”

“There’s no hurry about it. Besides, I don’t think you’ll be able to do it. Go and pack your clothes.”

A terrible old woman Magdalen Clyde had thought her. She gritted her teeth in weakness, and turned on him, terrible once more. “I took none of your money, [Pg 136]Stratharden,” she said. “I’ll take none of your orders. I’ll leave when I’m ready. And now ye can go.”

“Oh, if that’s it, we won’t quarrel over it!” he said easily. “I didn’t know it was a holiday jaunt. But if you’re wise, you’ll go to Ardmore. You’re getting old, my good soul, old and perhaps a little foolish. You can forget all I said about finding Lady Barnysdale, for I don’t know that I care especially where she is. I won’t forget how you tried to help me, and that’s the great thing. Good-by and, by the way, Keith, what you have in your mind is a mare’s nest, and I think you’ll find it so.” His laugh was so real that the housekeeper turned away her head. When she looked around he was gone.

She looked round the room wildly; then, lest each flying second should mean something, she sat herself down to think. He knew! And what she had written out was in her pocket, unless she had been a fool and made a mistake.

But it was not that. What she had written was in her hand, and she had asked no question anywhere that could have come to his ears. He might have searched the room while she was out, and found nothing.

With a snarl of rage she saw something, and ran to it with shaking knees. The blotting-book lay humped on the table, as she had not left it; and the hump, as she flung it open, was made of a tiny mirror such as some men carry about with them. She saw, and did not know what it meant; but as she jerked the mirror up against the edge of the book, the reflection in it caught her eye—the writing, left to right in the glass, plain.

“And me that did not know,” said Mrs. Keith. “And he’s found me out!” She dropped her face on her hands. “Good Lord, deliver us!”

For there would be no doing what she meant to do now. The girl herself was the only key, and Stratharden [Pg 137]had seen her and her black eyes, knew all that Keith thought, prayed, hoped. She lifted her head, and her face was gray.

“He was oversoft,” she thought painfully, for the horror that was on her had stunned her. “He saw that, and he saw her, and, for all I know——” A thrill shook her to her deadened soul. By her very door-steps had she not seen a Chinaman pass by as she entered, and had not so much as looked at his face! “I’ll never see her more,” she moaned. “I’ll never know.” Without speech with the girl, there was no detective in England who could help her, and she knew it; knew, too, that Stratharden’s Chinaman had followed Lady Barnysdale and her sister home, at his bidding, when he threw his cigar into the street.

“He shan’t do it!” she thought. “I’ll warn the police——” She abruptly stopped.

Warn them of what? A foolish surmise, a tissue of imaginations? End her days in a madhouse for telling a story without a leg to stand on. Her gray head dropped on her hands.

In the brougham Magdalen sat petrified with amazement. It had been Mrs. Keith, and no other, at the window, crooked bonneted, wild-eyed, motioning frantically to her not to stop. Keith, whom Dolly had thought the trusted ally of Stratharden. She could not understand it.

“Did you see them?” she cried. “That old wretch, and Stratharden behind her? They saw us; perhaps they’ll follow us home. I won’t be found. I won’t!”

“Charing Cross Station!” she ordered. “And be quick.” She thanked Heaven they had walked to a livery stable and taken the man there. He knew no address, if he were asked for one.

She sat in feverish silence till they got out in the crowded station, scarcely spoke till they were lost in the busy throng, had emerged in a maze of back streets that would take them home. Then she stamped her foot as she walked, with Ronald running by her side.

“How dare he watch for me? It’s no business of his where I am,” she said. “And if he’s living opposite the bank, with that wicked old devil Keith, I can’t get any money; for I won’t have them following me home.”

“You’re walking too fast for Ronald,” said Magdalen; she picked him up in her strong young arms. “Dolly, I can’t understand you. I don’t think I ever could. If you don’t want to go to the bank, make a check payable to Madame Aline, and I’ll go with it.”

“And Providence will identify you, I suppose,” she [Pg 139]dryly remarked; “and old Keith won’t know your black-and-white face and her head! She could follow you home as well as me, couldn’t she? You know yourself they tried their hardest to get him out of the way,” her keen fixed eyes on Ronald. “If they find us they’ll do it again.”

“Look here,” said Magdalen. “I can’t see any sense in all this. Stratharden knows you’re here. Why don’t you snap your fingers at him and go about openly? Anyone would think you’d been going to steal from the bank! It’s your own money. Why don’t you face Stratharden, and speak out what we know? But hold your tongue if you like, but stop this idiotic hiding.”

For an instant Magdalen paused. There was one thing that made her think there was sense in this madness of Dolly’s. Mrs. Keith had been afraid, too. It was that desperate, earnest terror in the old woman’s face that had made Magdalen drop the check-string unpulled. With all her soul the housekeeper had warned them not to stop. But in the safe, busy London streets common sense spoke loud to her. Here there could be no hole-and-corner poisoning, no keeping them prisoners here.

“Be reasonable, Dolly!” she cried. “What could they do if they found us, a hundred times? Or, if you’re really afraid of them, tell the police. And if you won’t, I will. Why should we hide like criminals?”

“Do you want to kill me with your police? Isn’t it enough that I’m frightened, that I’ve no money——”

“Oh, Dolly,” her stepsister’s voice cut her short with a kind of despair in it, “why won’t you trust me? You’ve something behind all this. Tell me, let me help you.”

“It’s nothing,” said Lady Barnysdale. “Noth——” The words died on her lips.

Face to face with them, a gardenia in his creased frock [Pg 140]coat, an immaculate tie round a twice-worn collar, was Starr-Dalton.

He stopped, flushed dull-red with incredulous triumph, and stood hat in hand, barring the way. It was no news to him that Dolly was in London, but he had thought her harder to find than this. His coarse smile was odious.

“Dolly, oh, forgive me—Lady Barnysdale!” he cried, his red-rimmed eyes on hers. “What a charming meeting! But somehow I fancied you wouldn’t stay long out of London.”

Fancied! Magdalen’s blood boiled. When she knew that he knew. Was she to be worried with Starr-Dalton, when Dolly was already doing her best to give Stratharden an excuse for calling her crazy? And Dolly, the color of ashes, was stopping.

Not a word had she said about Lovell, for fear of Dolly’s laughter and worse; not a word about the dogging of her steps by the man who stood smiling before her, but it came back to her now with all its intolerable impertinence.

She took no notice of Mr. Starr-Dalton by word or look; she could have shaken Dolly in her fury that in the middle of things that mattered she should care whether a man like this met them or not. For she looked as if she would faint in the street.

“Come, Dolly!” she cried. “Here’s a hansom”—for it was the only way to be rid of him; she knew of old how he stuck.

“I’m going to walk,” she said, and something in her voice turned the girl’s heart cold. “Don’t you know Mr. Starr-Dalton, Magdalen?”

Even Starr-Dalton, who did not admire her, saw the stare she gave him was superb.

“How have I offended Miss Magdalen?” Mr. Starr-Dalton gazed fishily at the sky. “I apologize until I hear. But if she says you are to drive home she is probably right.”

“She’s got one,” she retorted, and for a minute thought Dolly would back her. For Lady Barnysdale had waved away the second hansom, had leaned for one breathless instant on Magdalen’s arm.

“There’s hardly room for three of us in one,” Dolly said, and if her voice was not steady there was a sudden courage in the look she gave Mr. Starr-Dalton; evil courage, if Magdalen had known it. “I must hurry home now, but perhaps you’ll come to tea this afternoon.”

Miss Clyde, with Ronald in her arms, hung paralyzed, half in and half out of her hansom. Dolly, with her old smile, was giving their address, Madame Aline and all, to the man.

“For Heaven’s sake,” she said when she had tumbled to her seat and Dolly was beside her, “what ails you? He’s a hateful, disreputable beast and you know it. How can you worry with a man like that when you ought to be thinking.” She bit her lip. When Dolly looked at her like that there was no sense in talking to her.

“Because he’ll be useful,” said Lady Barnysdale. “He loves the ground I walk on”—in which she was wrong; he was only hugging to himself when she left him the thought of a very different thing. “I must have some one to help me and he’ll do it. Leave me in peace for [Pg 142]a week to manage my own affairs and we won’t need your dear police.”

“Help you! Like he helped us in Krug’s restaurant,” she scornfully retorted.

“Was that why you were so rude to him? You did your best to”—she hesitated—“to make him detest us.”

“In his conduct at Krug’s? No!” She poured out what she had never meant Dolly to know about Lovell and the bakery and Starr-Dalton.

“What!” cried Dolly; her laugh cut like a knife. “You! Having tea with a man you don’t know! For you can’t know him; I never heard of any Lovell in my life.” The mirth died out of her face. “What’s he like? Is he a gentleman? Does he know who you are?”

“You ought to know whether he is a gentleman or not!” The laugh had touched her temper. “He put out the lights in Krug’s restaurant.”

Dolly sat dumb. From every quarter wherever she looked something threatened her; things, people, the very straws in the street menaced her, and only her own wits to match against them all.

She turned to the only soul in the world who cared for her, except the child between them.

“You go out like a chorus girl and meet a man!” she cried, trembling with rage. “You, that were always fussy as one of your nuns if I spoke to a man I knew. You’re nothing but a hypocrite!” It was odd that she looked just like a chorus girl herself in her temper. “How do you know who the man is? He may have gone straight away and told Stratharden!”

“That’s absurd! For goodness’ sake, Doll, don’t let us fight!” Something had caught the blood at her heart. It was not that she had never seen Dolly in such a temper, but that, after all, she might be right. She got out of the hansom in silence.

There was more there than she knew. Dolly was afraid of Starr-Dalton! Think as she would she could not see why, but she knew it; and knew, too, that Dolly’s reasons for hiding were trumped-up lies. Her old uneasiness about Dolly’s turning into a countess swept back on her.

“If she only would not make so many mysteries!” she thought. But the biggest mystery of all was that Dolly should turn penniless away from an almost untouched bank-account rather than face Stratharden.

“My dear Dolly!” said Mr. Starr-Dalton; he looked round him with an air of lordly disgust. “You’ll forgive my saying that this—this surrounding—is a very queer freak for a little countess.”

Dolly, a little pale, a little roused, regarded him calmly. Before she told him things she must find out what he knew. It was well that Miss Magdalen Clyde, seated in dudgeon in the kitchen, could not see her stepsister’s face.

“It’s extremely dull being a countess,” said she. “The Scotch house appalled me, the town one was worse—I’d have seen Barnysdale’s ghost on the stairs!” For reasons of her own her shudder was real. “Anyhow, I prefer this to a suburban flat full of crying babies and women who wonder whether you’re respectable. Now, here you go in past the tailor’s shop, up one flight that no one uses but us and you’re at our front door—with a most respectable door-plate—if it were polished!”

“The two top stories,” she carelessly responded. “Down here this sitting-room, my room, Ronald’s; upstairs Magdalen’s, the dining-room and kitchen. It’s so convenient and comfortable.”

Mr. Starr-Dalton remembered the neglected passage, the cold stairs; looked at the gray and hideous wallpaper, the half-completed furnishings, and would have thought if it had not been for his hostess’ toilet that she was in lower water than ever since he had known her.

“Convenient and comfortable!” He gave one of those short, hateful laughs that always made Magdalen start. “I think it is. Can I have a whisky-and-soda? You know I don’t take tea.”

“If you want it you’ll have to go for it,” returned Dolly unmoved. “I’ve had no time to look for servants. There’s no housemaid.”

No time? To his certain knowledge that red-haired sister had been in town for a week.

For a moment the horrid conviction came over him that some one had spoiled the show—that he was too late to make any bargain. And the antique-furniture business was worse than ever.

“Dare! Oh, come now!” and his laugh was meant to be soothing. “You and I are too old friends to say ‘dare’ to each other.”

“How many did you write?” she repeated, thinking of the post-bag and Stratharden’s servants.

“I only wrote one; I didn’t mean to say letters,” Starr-Dalton said truthfully. “You got it?”

“I got it,” she carelessly observed, sinking back in her chair again. “I didn’t understand it. Why?”

“Look here, Dolly,” said the man not unkindly, “you may as well make a clean breast of it. You treated me d—— badly and you know it; paid me my money like a tradesman and gave me the cold slip. But I’m fond of you and I don’t bear malice, though I know well enough [Pg 146]you’d never have sent for me if I hadn’t met you by chance and you were afraid,” he added significantly.

“Say! I tried to catch up with your sister in the street and you’ll soon learn the truth.” For the first time he spoke unpleasantly. “But that’s neither here nor there. Are you here because you’ve been found out?” with a disparaging glance at the uncomfortable room.

“What do you mean?” She never moved, never looked either angry or startled. They were getting to the point, just as she had meant all along. “I’m here because it suits me.”

“Oh, rot!” ejaculated Mr. Starr-Dalton politely. “I found you out long ago; don’t you know that, Dolly?”

She knew it or she would not have been sitting behind Madame Aline’s door-plate; but she only shook her head.

“You’ll have to explain,” she deliberately returned. “I can’t talk in the dark.”

“Terms!” The word leaped in Mr. Starr-Dalton’s head exultingly. But he steadied himself as he remembered that it might be too late for a bargain with a countess who had retired incognito to a milliner’s discarded rooms.

“Oh, I’ll explain!” He was carefully picking out each blunt word. “I saw you at Krug’s that night when Churchill made all the shouting at you. I found out who he was; I saw him; I know all about you and him,” oblivious that he had found out from anyone but the man himself.

“Churchill!” Dolly Barnysdale became white. She had nearly said what could never have been recalled when she realized that Starr-Dalton was again speaking.

“Yes, just him! And do you mean to tell me that if some of your fine relations hadn’t found out that you [Pg 147]were married to him before you were to Barnysdale you’d be here?”

“Churchill! Married to him! Barnysdale!” The thoughts rang like bells in her brain. Was this all he knew—this?

She put out her hand and touched Starr-Dalton; called him for the first time by his Christian name.

“Jack, you’re all wrong,” she said. “Not a soul of them even dreams of anything like that. I’ll tell you presently—and you can believe me or not, as you like—why I’m here. Only first tell me what on earth you’ve got hold of about Churchill.” Her voice was very earnest, very natural.

“Just what I said. It’s enough, Dolly. Don’t put on frills. I saw your face when Churchill made all that row and it set me thinking——”

“You didn’t think about stopping him or helping me,” she sharply remarked.

“That pal of Magdalen’s was too quick for me, anyhow”—truthfully. “I don’t know that I thought about helping you. I was too—interested.”

“What? Before you knew I was Lady Barnysdale?” But she said it without malice.

“I thought you cleverer than to let any man have a hold on you,” he said simply. “I don’t mind saying that it didn’t occur to me to find out who Churchill was till you paid me my money and told me to go. And then I was angry. I went straight to Krug’s and a waiter told me all I wanted to know. It struck me——” Here he paused, neglecting to say, “there was money in it.”

“Just behind this very house. In the place off the lane. But he’s not there now; so you needn’t be frightened. He got hold of a little money and went away to die on it—he looked like dying.”

“And he told you he was married to me?” There was a queer look on her pretty face, the look of a woman who finds a live spark in the dead ashes of her heart.

Mr. Starr-Dalton considered a moment. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it was certainly safer.

“He said he didn’t know any Dolly and didn’t want to. But—he wasn’t alone when he said it!”

“Maltby. I asked him—oh, not that!—but just about Churchill in general. He told me he married a girl named Dolly Deane and deserted her—told me the year. But it was just casual gossip. He thought I knew Churchill well.”

Lady Barnysdale looked at him and saw he had told all he knew or thought. It was all she could do not to sit up like a creature transfigured, not to laugh or cry out. She had been hiding in holes and corners for this, that was not worth the snap of her finger—Churchill!

She had never acted well on the stage, but now her quick, blank face was perfect. Let him think he had her secret or he might end by finding it out.

“Then,” she said slowly, “I’ll tell you something. I never was married to Churchill, but——Oh, yes! he could rake up scandal.” For which she would not have [Pg 149]cared one penny. “It was that that terrified me. I came here partly because of your letter. I thought if I kept out of the way you might forget me—and Churchill—and partly——”

“I’d never forget,” he put in hastily. He did not believe one word she said, just as she had meant he should not. He drew his chair close to hers.

“Never!” And because her secret was safe she let her triumph break out; she looked him in the face with bright, steady eyes, her rouge showing like spots on her excited face. “Never, never, never!” she cried in exultation. “But, oh! Jack, I want a friend. I’m frightened to death and I didn’t dare do anything because I knew from your letter you were angry with me. I thought you meant to show me up.”

So she had, twenty minutes ago. Now she could have laughed in his face, for whatever secret she had Starr-Dalton had not touched the garment’s hem of it.

“You did your best to make me hate you,” he said slowly. “But—no, I never meant to give you away.”

Nor had he. Churchill was dying at a gallop, might be in his grave now; and “the Countess of Barnysdale and Mr. Starr-Dalton” would make an imposing mouthful; to say nothing of the money that would come through a matrimonial connection of the two names.

Dolly put her hand on his thick one, that Magdalen would have died rather than have touched.

“You’re a good friend, Jack,” she said simply, “and if you’ll help me you won’t regret it. If you hadn’t frightened me by your letter I’d have sent for you the minute I got to London. Now listen to me and have patience, for it’s a long story.”

Word for word she told him about Ardmore and Ronald—everything. If she all but left out the Chinaman [Pg 150]it was because he seemed the least important part of the whole thing. She had not gone in terror of him night and day, like Magdalen.

“So you see I was frightened and I hid. I dared not do anything else while I thought you might tell all you knew about me,” she finished. “As for this morning, we gave them the slip. All they know is that I’m in London.”

Starr-Dalton sat stupefied. She had told her story patchily—it did not hang together; but even so he could see she meant every incredible word of it.

“I can’t,” with a little significant gesture. “Suppose I charged Stratharden with trying to murder Ronald and me, do you think my whole history wouldn’t come out? They might convict him, and much good it would do me when I was stripped of my money and my name. Anyhow, who’d believe me? The story is too monstrous! Even you think I’m exaggerating.”

“If it were any other man than Stratharden!” said Starr-Dalton significantly. “But, on my soul, Dolly, you’re right. To tell would get you put in a lunatic asylum. I never heard a breath about the man except that your getting the title has ruined him. He’s extravagant, of course, but nothing else. He’s a great traveler, a tremendous swell, who goes everywhere and—oh! you might as well accuse the Prince of Wales of murder.”

“That’s just what I meant,” she said quietly. “Why I’m here and why I never mean him to set eyes on me or Ronald again. He’s so clever and so deep that no one ever suspects his infamy.”

Mr. Starr-Dalton only knew Lord Stratharden as a perfectly dressed and well-mannered man, who collected [Pg 151]curiosities and needed money. The last and that alone made him put any faith in Dolly’s story. He was a shrewd man in his way and he took in every line of her face as he looked at her. There was no doubt she was terrified.

“The money is the least part of it,” he said. “You draw the checks and I’ll get you all the money you want.”

“Who said I was Madame Aline? Not I. It’s Magdalen. I’m only staying with her. There’s no harm in that.”

“Except it is not specially natural that she should work when you’ve money. However——” He bent over her suddenly. “Dolly, supposing I help you do all you say, where do I come in?”

With the hate of hell in her heart, because but for what she thought he knew she would not have been here, Lady Barnysdale looked at him with sweet, amiable eyes. Now he was useful; by and by, when she had done with him and he was sent raging and impotent away, there would be no need to tell him how she hated him. He would know, as a snake knows whose back is broken.

“If I do it’s enough for you to know that I do without talking of it. Now, can’t you see it would make too much talk and stir? If I’m not quite quiet I may turn into Dolly Arden again, without a penny. You’ve [Pg 152]got to help me, keep me safe from Stratharden and Churchill. And you once lent me money; now I’ll lend you all you want”—counting cleverly enough on the lowness of his funds; for in spite of the gardenia the man had a shifty, impecunious look.

“Stratharden may drop in on you any day,” he said; not that he believed it, for what might have been done at Ardmore could not be done in London.

“Not with you to help me!” she cried. “Every time I want money you’ll forward my check from Paris. I’ll make it payable to you; you’ll endorse it. Stratharden will find out from the bank and never come near me. If he gets at you you’ll know what to say, you’re my man of business. Go out, Jack, and get your whisky and some soda. I can drink my tea now, for I’m safe—safe!”

“When you tell me in plain English what the end’s going to be,” he said with the uncomfortable gleam still in his eyes.

“Let things quiet down, let people forget me.” She was certainly doing what he asked. “Churchill can’t live forever; Maltby doesn’t know Lady Barnysdale is me,” she ungrammatically declared; “no one does but you and Churchill. And when he’s gone——” She smiled at him and for the first time the passion he had had for Dolly Arden awoke under Lady Barnysdale’s eyes.

Mr. Starr-Dalton departed to buy whisky and soda—for which she omitted to give him the money—and as the front door closed on him Dolly Barnysdale stood up and danced in silent glee.

“He doesn’t know—nobody knows!” she thought rapturously. “I’ll get rid of him by sending him to Paris and get Stratharden off the scent. He shall go to-morrow, to-morrow.” She waltzed around the room and broke into wild laughter. “Churchill,” she gasped, “and I married to him! If we wait till he dies and can’t talk we’ll wait a good while. He’s been a death’s-head ever since I first saw him; that kind never die. Marry Starr-Dalton!” The glee died from her face. “Oh, how I hate him!” she thought passionately. “Except for the dinners I got out of him when I used to be hungry. All I want is to be left in peace with Ronald.”

She stood thinking, as a scout might stand looking over doubtful country. As a scout might lie hidden, seeking more secure cover behind her fear of Stratharden.

Starr-Dalton was no matter; Maltby had never seen her; he was a hearsay man who lived a life she never touched; Churchill was dying. Those were all, absolutely all, who could talk. She assured herself they were all and knew all the time that it was casual people, not her enemies, who might spring a mine under her.

She would never dare go to a theater nor take up her abode in Barnysdale’s house; never dare live the life her soul loved.

“I knew that all along,” she said to herself coolly. “It’s a small price to give for money and Ronald.”

As if the child’s name brought back the terror of Stratharden, she ran to the window and looked into the dreary street. There was not a soul to be seen but Starr-Dalton, approaching with his pockets unduly distended.

When he knocked at the door she let him in with a quiet heart; after half an hour she let him out again to catch the night train for Paris.

For the first time since that far-away dinner at Krug’s she went to bed in peace.

But Lord Stratharden sat up far into the night with the information he had gleaned from Keith’s blotting-book neatly written out before him. He had not been idle while Dolly talked to her wolf who had turned out to be a sheep. He had learned enough to ruin his sister-in-law and her boy to-morrow. But to-morrow he would get no good of it.

“By George!” said Dick Lovell to himself, “I can’t go to see her. I haven’t the nerve.”

He stood in the sunny street at a time when a conscientious photographer’s assistant should have been hard at work, and was annoyed at his own discomfiture. Because a girl was a milliner was no reason a man could present himself at her house without being asked; yet half an hour ago he had been fool enough to take French leave from photography for just that purpose.

“Glad I stopped myself before I hung around her door like a cad!” he thought. He looked up from the curbstone he was considering and saw Dark Magdalen herself, almost at his elbow. She was walking west with slow steps and eyes as somber as her black gown.

At the sound of his quick greeting she stopped and saw him standing with his hat off, a white carnation in his blue serge coat, his brown, lean face bent down to her with a laugh of pleasure in eyes and mouth.

“How do you do?” she said a little breathlessly as she shook hands with him and wondered why Dolly’s male friends could not take off and put on their hats with this man’s manner.

He was looking at her through lowered lashes with that trick he had; there was a kind of sweet keenness in his gray eyes.

“Very well, now,” he returned; “a minute ago I wasn’t so sure. To tell the truth, I was wishing I dared go and [Pg 156]call on you—and I didn’t dare.” The words were boyish, the sense of them graver.

“Call?” said Magdalen stupidly. “On me?” She began to laugh. “No one ever comes to see me,” she observed frankly. “I couldn’t have let you in.”

She thanked Heaven he had not dared, for Dolly would have worried her life out with silly cautions, let alone jeering laughters. And—she glanced once more at his face. If, as Dolly said, she knew nothing about him, she knew at least that a man with a mouth and eyes like Lovell’s was not apt to be other than he seemed.

“That’s a lucky escape for me,” he was saying gravely. “I’m glad you came out. Do you know you’re not looking well?”

It was no earthly business of his and it was not polite; which may have been what brought a faint flame to her cheeks.

“I’ve been indoors too much,” she returned with some haste and perfect truth. “I came out now for a walk.”

“So did I,” calmly; but the next minute they were smiling in each other’s face like two children.

“I may accompany you?” he said with a little deferential manner, foreign enough to a girl who was accustomed to men like Starr-Dalton. She nodded half shyly. Dolly would have gasped incredulously at the look on her stepsister’s face.

“I don’t know where to go,” she said, looking around her. She had turned Bedford Square, away from Hare’s Buildings, simply because she would not let herself go toward Fleet Street, on the chance of meeting Dick Lovell; just as he had strolled in the same direction while his courage about going to see her was oozing out of him.

“No!” said Lovell reflectively, little knowing they were [Pg 157]both gloating on the instant reward of their individual virtue.

The afternoon was sunny, almost hot; enervating, as such winter days are. The park would be fit to sit in, but—he had no desire to be seen westward, either alone or otherwise. Especially otherwise, he decided hastily; it would not be fair.

“Regent’s Park,” he announced at last, for not a soul who knew him and could gossip would be there.

“Hansom,” he answered as laconically. “We can sit down all the way there and back. You learn the joy of sitting down when you’re a photographer.”

He put her into the hansom as he had once in his life helped a princess into her carriage. As he did it she noticed the spotless cleanliness of his cuff, the fine white skin inside his wrist; something made her head swim a little as he got in beside her.

“Do you know,” said Lovell slowly, “I always have a queer feeling when I’m with you? That I’ve known you for a long time—for always, really—that everything you do or say is just what I know you will do or say.”

“You’ve known some one like me,” she answered, and she was not looking at him.

“I never knew anyone—like you!” he said coolly. He had something to say to her, but not here in a hansom, where she could not get away from him. He sat beside her quite silent; so content that it would have been rapture if a doubt had not been there, too.

And Magdalen, with the sun and the wind in her face, forgot Dolly and Mrs. Keith, and Stratharden; forgot even to forget that she was driving openly through the London streets, for all the world to see her red hair and black eyes. She turned to him with her [Pg 158]lovely laugh as they left the hansom and strolled along a sun-dried path to a sunny bench backed by evergreens.

“Do you know,” she said, “that whenever I meet you you always want your own way? First you hustle me out of a restaurant by the shoulders; next you march me to tea with you and home in a hansom. To-day——”

“To-day I want my own way again,” with a curious quietness. The laughter was gone from his eyes that were eager, full of sweetness.

The slow, direct words should have startled her, but there was no surprise in her face. A hot color leaped there and died away.

“You see,” the low note of his voice made her quiver, “I’ve loved you ever since that night at Krug’s; I don’t know that you care, I can’t expect you to, but——”

“You don’t know anything about me,” she whispered. “You don’t even know that I mayn’t be married already.”

“Oh, I do!” said Dick Lovell. “That’s nonsense, you know,” with soft slowness. “Look at me, Magdalen.”

She could not lift her eyes to his strong, brown face; she looked instead at his blue serge sleeve. There was a tiny rip in it and she would have liked to mend it.

“Are you angry? Do you hate me?” the man asked as simply as he had asked, “Will you marry me?”

Her eyes got as high as his collar and rested on the bit of his throat between it and his ear. She had a mad desire to answer him with her lips there, to——She turned to him with a sudden pride, found—Heaven knew where.

“I’m glad,” she said. “No, don’t answer me. I want to tell you something. I’m not Madame Aline; my sister and I just live in her house and we left her door-plate. And——”

“That’s all now,” for the rest was Dolly’s business. “Except that my name’s Magdalen Clyde and I haven’t a penny on earth.”

“Did you think,” he softly asked, “that I was in love with the millinery business? As for names”—he had reddened a little—“do you think they matter much? Could you marry a Lovell—a plain one—as easily as if he had another name and a handle to it?”

“You’re Dark Magdalen! Why do you laugh? Didn’t you know that’s what I call you?”

She was not laughing; she was prouder of the way he said it than if he could have made her Queen of England. Yet she looked him in the face with a remembrance of Dolly and what Dolly would say.

“And you care a little?” His voice held a hundred tendernesses in it. “Enough to marry a man with just enough to keep you?”

“I care,” her voice was not steady. “But I——Oh, you must wait till I talk to my sister! There are things——I can’t leave her.”

“I don’t mean dark secrets, any more than yours are, but you ought to know them. I wasn’t born a photographer, Magdalen. But I’m getting on at it.”

“I didn’t suppose you were,” glancing at his dark, spare face, his threadbare serge that had never come off a “ready-made” counter. “Mr. Lovell, let it all go for to-day; don’t let us think who we are or what our relatives will say.”

The last thing did not cause him any solicitude; and, [Pg 160]after all, there was time enough for explaining. He looked at her slim, gloved hands and wondered if those rings of his mother’s would fit her.

“Say Dick,” he coolly remarked, “and I’ll do anything you like. I don’t call you Miss Clyde, do I?”

“You ought to.” She looked at him with a sweet insolence that made him want to kiss the hem of her gown.

It struck him suddenly that while he was threadbare she was freshly and perfectly dressed, from her hat to her shoes. His brow darkened as he looked at her.

“I’ve been a brute,” he said, “a selfish brute! Look here, my darling; I’m poor. Do you mind? I mean really poor. I couldn’t give you many shoes like you’re wearing.”

“I have three pairs like them,” said Magdalen. “Perhaps they won’t be worn out by the time I marry you. Oh, Dick”—her eyes laughed as she looked at him—“how silly you are! My sister gave me these; she has money now; but we used often to be so poor that we were hungry. That night at Krug’s I’d only had dry bread all day.”

“I’ll give you better than that,” with a certain grim doggedness. “Magdalen, you’ll let me come and see you now, won’t you?”

Dolly’s rage at the hint of such a thing flashed over her. And Starr-Dalton—for nothing on earth would she run the chance of letting Lovell see a man like Starr-Dalton in her house.

“I don’t want you to,” she said simply. “You see, Dolly will be so angry about it she’ll say we’d no right to speak to each other. And she’s in some trouble just now; she’s worried. I think you’d better wait.”

That meant trusting to luck to see her. He was not [Pg 161]going to have her make secret appointments with any man, even him.

“You know best,” he said not too willingly. “It—it’s rather rough, you know.”

“Do you suppose I don’t want you to come?” she asked almost fiercely. “I can’t invite you, that’s all. It’s not my house—it’s Dolly’s, I——”

There, going past—and why was it that she knew without seeing her—was Mrs. Keith, a grim old figure in a dusty gown. And if she had seen her all she would have to do would be to follow Magdalen Clyde home.

Unconsciously the girl slipped close to Lovell’s side and looked at him as she had looked at him for the first time in her life, at Krug’s restaurant.

In front of all London—though it consisted just now of an old woman he had not noticed and two sparrows—he put his arm round her.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I won’t worry you any more. I’ll swear, if you like, never to speak to you again till you send for me. Magdalen, can’t you see I love you? There is nothing on God’s earth for me but you.”

The arm she leaned against was iron, the shoulder against hers iron, too; in the strength and safety of them the color came to her face.

The man stooped and kissed her, since even the sparrows were gone; and the soul of Magdalen Clyde went into his keeping and his to her.

Without a word, since neither could speak, they moved away—in the paradise God lets some men and women stay in.

Ten minutes later a breathless old woman ran frantically [Pg 162]after a hansom that drove away and, when there was no other to be had, cursed roundly in broad Scotch.

“I’ve bided my time too long, too long!” thought Mrs. Keith, and the fear in her stopped her senseless rage. “’Twas her, and—I’d thought you with her was a better man, a better man!”

She cursed again at the weariness of her feet as she went hurriedly on. It was a fool’s errand from the beginning; it was a beaten fool’s now, if that man were against her, with his hard eyes.

It was not much of a congratulation on her sister’s engagement and she had gone out without another word. The little sitting-room in Hare’s Buildings seemed very dull and cheerless to Magdalen, left alone there; but, even so, that was no reason that she should come out of her sullen thoughts with a jump and find herself leaning forward—listening till her heart seemed to stop in her.

She had been alone there often enough, since Dolly was always out; she must be getting nervous. She said a scornful word to herself and tried to think of Lovell. But it was no use.

The sound—that could be no sound but the moving of her own blood—had her by the throat. It was not a rustle, more like a certain subtle jarring; a pad, pad, as of bare feet stepping very softly.

“Some one on the stairs,” she thought determinedly, but her eyes were very black in her pale face. She marched to the hall door and opened it.

There was the empty landing, the vacant staircase that went down to the entrance, where the fanlight in the tailor’s side door glowed cheerfully.

She locked the door and went back to her seat, something making her move softly; an absurd thing to do in an empty house. More absurd still, she sat down [Pg 164]by the fire, facing the door of the little room, her back hard against the wall, as if the place were haunted.

She looked round her with a kind of contempt for herself. The room was not big enough to swing a cat in or to hide one. Opposite her was a sofa and the open door; at her right hand a window and a writing-table; at her left a high bookcase in the middle of a blank wall. The whole place was not more than four yards square. It was a fine thing to be nervous here, when in all the eery gloom of Ardmore Castle she had been steady enough.

Her face grew hard and dark. If Dolly would only listen to her! But not a word she said went through that armor of Dolly’s that was made of obstinacy and—even to herself she would not say deceit.

All the same, there was absolutely no cause for the uneasiness that was gripping the girl’s soul.

A week had gone by since that vision of Keith and Stratharden at the window; a week in which there had been no sign of either; no stranger at the door; not so much as a glance cast after either Dolly or Magdalen in the street. Starr-Dalton had never appeared again after that one day; and whatever had troubled Dolly was over. Except that she never let Ronald out of her sight or the front door off the latch, she seemed to have forgotten that she had ever feared Stratharden or anyone else. But somehow that very thought set the girl’s face in what Dolly called “Magdalen’s scowl.”

“She’s been at her old tricks,” she reflected angrily. “He must have lent her that money.” Which was true enough; even Mr. Starr-Dalton could rake up five pounds to lend to a lady who allowed him fifteen per cent. on every check he cashed for her.

“She’s out a great deal; she never seems to think it [Pg 165]mayn’t be safe to take Ronald,” she mused. “But they wouldn’t dare kidnap him. I fancy Lord Stratharden has done his best and shot his bolt. Any more would make a noise and we know too much for it to be safe to meddle with us. I wish Dolly would come home. It’s getting dark.”

It was; dark and foggy. The room looked thick with the fog that crept in through the badly fitting windows. The fire had died down to a dull-red glow, ugly, cheerless; she was cold. Miss Clyde stretched out a long, graceful arm to the grate—and sat with a pounding heart.

“Pad, pad!” there it was again. More the feeling of a sound than a sound itself, yet her young flesh crawled on her bones.

The thing, whatever it was, was in the house, not on the stairs. She sat rigid on the rug, one hand still stretched out to the forgotten fire. The soft, slow sound was over her head, upstairs; almost inaudible in the hush of her listening, through which came the cheerful passing of cabs in the street. If it was tangible enough to be like anything human it was like a bare foot on a bare floor. Only nerves strung up and sharpened could have known there was a sound at all.

“Fool!” exclaimed the girl through shut, vicious teeth. A great tide of hot blood seemed to flash through her veins that had run so slow.

She got up and went out in the hall and up-stairs. All the fear had gone out of her; she moved like a man does, confidently. If there were a thief in the house, or any one else, he might have done well to run from a girl whose eyes looked like Magdalen Clyde’s.

The dim staircase was empty. The dining-room that was in the back of the house, over the sitting-room, empty, desolate; for as Dolly would have no servants they never [Pg 166]used it. In the kitchen there was no one, the slim ranks of dishes on the dresser were as usual; the table, set for dinner, was untouched.

In Magdalen’s own bedroom there was nothing more ghostly than her gowns hanging on the wall, very black and straight.

Mr. Lovell’s “good luck” stood in the middle of the room and looked a fool. It had all been imagination. The windows were three stories above the street and no one but a cat could have entered them. One of them was open six inches or so, leaving plenty of room for just that cat.

“I am an idiot, with my footsteps!” thought Miss Clyde wrathfully. She shut down the window and lighted all the gas, up-stairs and down, before she sat down again.

She had been listening for Dolly and that began the mischief. No one can listen long in an empty house and not hear something. Certainly there was no sound now, nor the dream of one.

“Still, I may as well finish, or I’ll be thinking of it in the night,” she thought. It was half-past six; the tailor’s shop would be shut, the hands gone home; the back premises down-stairs open to the explorer.

Candle in hand, latch-key and matches in pocket, she emerged on the landing and shut her own front door behind her. The tailor’s shop was dark; the street door ajar at the foot of the staircase. A streak of light came through it and the cheerful yell of a newsboy. Standing with her back to the door, she saw the bare, narrow passage, half-way down it her own stairs; past them, at the end of it, a green baize door. As she looked at it it swung forward a little, as with some draft, then swung back. It must have been that soft closing and opening she had magnified into a quiet foot over her head.

“Still,” she thought sensibly, “they oughtn’t to go away and leave a ground-floor window open if it is in a dark area. Goodness knows who may live in those horrid houses behind us.”

She gave the green door a push and went in as it gave to her hand, and saw nothing but the dark hole where the tailor hands ate their dinner on a table littered with crumbs and greasy papers. The barred and grated window was shut, yet the air in the room was oddly fresh.

“A ventilator, of course!” she thought vexedly, having let her nerves run riot for nothing.

At the foot of her own stairs she turned and saw the baize door move again stealthily and swing back; if she had not known about that draft, would have been certain some one stood behind it. But as it was she went up-stairs with a contemptuous dismissal of the feeling that there was somebody behind her. It was time to get ready for Dolly—to cook.

“Why on earth couldn’t we have an all-night restaurant below us instead of a tailor’s shop? It mightn’t be so respectable, but it would be a hundred times more convenient,” she thought; yet it was not the cooking that was on her mind, but the loneliness of the place at night, that she had never cared two pins about till now. And the next second she forgot it, for Dolly’s key clicked in the latch.

Hand in hand with Ronald she swept in, a different Dolly from the angry one who had gone out.

“We’re awfully late; I’m starving,” she cried gaily. “Oh, it’s so horrid out of doors! What a wretched fire, Magdalen.”

“I forgot it,” she replied guiltily. “Where’ve you been?” There was a quick, incredulous hope in her that Dolly had repented about Lovell.

“Don’t sit on that, Ronald! It’s a chicken. I felt it would be my death if I didn’t have chicken.”

She pulled something from the front of her dress and rustled it in Magdalen’s face.

“What about old Stratharden now?” she exclaimed triumphantly. “He can watch at the bank till he’s black in the face. Look there!” her packet of clean five-pound notes flourished over her head.

“Starr-Dalton cashed it,” Dolly observed, half careless, half defiant. “I told you he’d be useful.”

“It’s all so unnecessary,” she said heavily. “There’s no sense in it. Why can’t we behave like ordinary people?” Perhaps the knowledge that she herself had not been behaving like an ordinary person during Dolly’s absence sharpened her tongue. “What excuse would Stratharden have for hunting us? And if he wanted to, putting that out of the question, there’s no possible hope that he couldn’t lay his finger on us this very minute.” Somehow that creeping noise that she had but just now thoroughly explained to herself came back to her unreasonably.

Dolly looked at her, a sudden breeze of good sense blowing through her shut-up little mind. But Dolly never believed in impulses.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked reasonably enough. “It’s got nothing to do with you. I’m sick of it,” and truly she looked it as her small head went back distastefully.

“Put yourself in my place, Dolly. You don’t really put enough trust in me to be open with me. I have [Pg 169]to live shut up in this hole—oh, I don’t mind the cooking and cleaning; it isn’t that. It’s because you know all about Stratharden and yet you won’t protect yourself against him. I’m tired of it. I want to have some life of my own.”

“It’s plain sense,” she retorted. “You’ve money; Stratharden has nothing against you but that silly invention of madness that wouldn’t work anywhere but in an out-of-the-world place like Ardmore. Why can’t we go and live openly somewhere and let Starr-Dalton be ‘useful’ to other people? Then, if Stratharden did anything, you’d have a good case and the law at your back. While here——” She shrugged her shoulders.

The law at her back! When, for what she had done to Magdalen alone she could be put in prison to-morrow, let alone anything else. The rouge on Dolly’s cheeks stood out like fire.

“Here he can’t send in servants to meddle with Ronald,” she said irrelevantly. “That’s why I won’t have one. How do I know who she might be? As for a good case and the police”—for one instant she shut her eyes—“I’m not going to have all my past life dragged up by the police because you’re bored—so now you know.”

“Then there’s something——” It was a stupid speech from Magdalen Clyde, who was not surprised at all, but only contemptuous.

“There’s nothing.” There was nothing in the voice to tell whether Dolly was ghastly from fright or fury. “How dare you say there is?” With the old, senseless fierceness she snatched Ronald to her. “I tell you he’s Barnysdale’s [Pg 170]son and I’ll fight for him in my own way. You can interfere, if you want to kill me.”

For a girl who had all along been sure there was a lie somewhere, Magdalen felt oddly sick.

“Don’t talk about it, will you?” It was an order, not a question. “I only told you to—to make you understand. I suppose you haven’t told your Lovell about me yet.”

“Doll,” said the girl impulsively, “give up being a countess!” If there was meaning in her words Dolly did not mark it. “This place is paid for. I’ll work for you.”

“Who’ll buy them? Nonsense! Half of this is for you.” She held out the roll of notes. “I owe it to you.”

“How could you owe me anything?” she cried and turned away; no power on earth would have made her touch that money Dolly had been afraid to go and get. “I’ll begin that hat business to-morrow. I’ve been sending away Madame Aline’s old customers all the week.”

To work at anything would be better than to sit thinking her nerves into fiddlestrings as she had to-day. The prospect of it cheered her as she woke in the middle of the night. The next minute she sat bolt upright in her bed. That sound had been no fancy this afternoon. She heard it now through the black dark.

With a curious impulse—and surely her guardian angel must have been at her elbow—Magdalen Clyde got up and locked her thick wooden shutters and her window.

Alone in the night, with her body dull and her spirit [Pg 171]quick, she thrilled superstitiously, so like was that soft, clinging pad to the feet of death dogging her. What madness was it put into her head that it was just like that, soft and slow, with long steps, that Lovell would move on bare feet?

All thought and desire for the hat-making business had deserted Magdalen’s mind when she came, late and heavy-eyed, to breakfast. Which was probably the reason that on the sound of the electric bell she ran down and found, not the baker’s boy, but a customer.

“I don’t know,” said the imitation Madame Aline rather doubtfully. She looked at the pretty old lady before her and did not open the door. Inside did not look much like a milliner’s establishment. “I,” with a brilliant inspiration, “never make bonnets—only hats.”

The strange old lady looked very pale in the gray light of the landing. To the blind a voice is a very telltale thing; Madame Aline’s had perhaps sounded as though she had no desire for a new customer.

“I am easily pleased.” The girl saw suddenly that her visitor’s silk gown and mantle were old-fashioned. “I am not very rich and I am blind.”

“Stone blind, madam. Look!” She turned her face instinctively to the scant light and Magdalen saw that the bright, brown eyes were sightless. “But perhaps, for those reasons, you will not care——”

“Oh,” with quick compassion, “but I will. I will make you anything you like. Only—I—that is—I have nothing ready.”

“I did not want anything ready. I have—but I do not like to ask you. You are busy.”

“Then, as you are so kind, I have already a dozen—more—of [Pg 173]bonnets. But it is that I am blind and live alone. Sometimes I select one and the children laugh at me in the street. If you would look at them and remodel me one from them.”

“Of course I will.” She looked to see a hat-box, but the new customer was empty-handed. “When will you bring them?” For a blind woman could not see that the milliner’s shop had neither hats, bonnets nor looking-glasses.

“I go out seldom,” said the woman slowly. “I thought if madame were not too occupied she might perhaps come to me. I am called Madame Duplessis and I live behind you, in Hare’s Rents.”

A half thought, a misgiving, struck her hearer; but the next minute she saw its absurdity. There was no reason to think Lord Stratharden was troubling his head about them; and if he were it was not likely he would send an emissary from Hare’s Rents who did not even ask to come in or for anyone but Madame Aline.

“It was M. Lovell who told me of you, madame,” she said, and no one would ever have known the words were as purely gambling as drawing a card at poker. “I asked him if there were a milliner near here and he told me, ‘Madame Aline.’ He will tell you that I pay my debts,” with a little smiling dignity. “But Hare’s Rents is a poor place, madame, and perhaps I am a customer who will not show off your wares.” There was not a hint in her voice of the terrible excitement that was in her old heart.

Lovell! That warning fling of Dolly’s about not knowing who he was came back to the girl, but she did not care. It was only nonsense, anyhow. He loved her; he—the very thought of his hard, keen strength did her good after the silly terrors of yesterday.

“I hardly know Mr. Lovell,” she answered mechanically, “but it was kind of him to recommend me. I will do your work with pleasure.”

“I suppose you could not come now?” she unexpectedly asked. “You could not leave?”

Why not? She was sick of the house, had meant to go out anyhow and had her hat and coat on.

“I think I can leave,” she cried with a laugh at the non-existent business that could keep her. “I’m going out,” she called to Dolly, who, being only half dressed, could not come to investigate if she had even thought of it.

The blind woman felt her way down-stairs, and a wonder crept over the girl how she had ever found her way from Hare’s Rents.

“You do not see how I got here,” said Aunt Manette shrewdly, as they reached the street.

“It is quite simple, when one has been blind for twenty years and alone. I knew there was no street to cross. I kept my feet on the curbing and that told me when the corner came. Presently I asked a man to take me to your door.”

It might be simple, but it was dreadful to the girl who could see the feathers on a flying sparrow.

“Twenty-four steps from turning into this dirty lane. It is here, I think. An open door—very dirty?”

Madame Duplessis, whom her world knew as Aunt Manette, nodded. The girl behind her marveled as she followed her up the filthy stairs why an old woman, who wore a brocade mantle, should live in such a place. They did not meet a soul as they climbed to the third story; perhaps the blind woman had known they would not at [Pg 175]this time of day. Half of Hare’s Rents got up early and went to work; the other half stayed in bed till dark.

“We arrive,” she cried gaily, unlocking her own door unerringly from long practise in the dark.

The morning sun poured into the place through fresh white curtains and rows of blossoming flowers. There was a good fire, a clean brick hearth, a high-backed chintz chair beside it. The whole room was as scrupulously clean and fresh as a French inn, and the most homelike place, as well, that the girl had ever seen.

“You see, I am ready for you,” she said, and Magdalen saw an array of bonnet-boxes. Every one of them had “Worth” or “Pingat” on the cover; but as she took out the bonnets one by one she repressed a laugh. No wonder the children said things in the streets. Every bonnet had been the acme of extravagant fashion twenty years ago, and now——She glanced round the spotless room. To have come to this from Worth and Pingat had taken some time.

“Did you want a black bonnet?” she said with a smile that was very kindly, looking at the grass-green, staring-blue and magenta monsters surrounding her.

“Yes,” she said hastily. “I wear black. You mean——” Her hands were clasped hard in front of her; she did not care a straw what the milliner meant.

“Pale-fawn, trimmed with—with leather!” Magdalen could not imagine anyone with such a thing on her head.

“It was hers—my daughter’s. She was so young that day,” she said as if to herself. “Would you—would you put it on, Madame Aline?”

Magdalen unpinned her hat. She did not even smile to herself as in the glass she beheld the green atrocity on her head; for the eyes that could not see her were full of tears.

“It goes so,” explained the old woman gently. She pushed it back a little on the dull, thick hair—and Magdalen noticed the delicate cleanliness of the old white hand. “Madame has beautiful hair.”

“It’s red,” she said. It was lucky no one could see her in the bright-green hat.

“Minon’s was brown,” the old woman said dully. “You will permit me, madame? They are my eyes.”

Magdalen stood still as the cool, smooth finger-tips went over her face. The blind woman’s face she did not look at, which was well. But the next minute it was the Aunt Manette whom Lovell knew that spoke to her, and the girl, curiously enough, felt a sudden liking for the very hardness of the voice.

“What do you mean to get out of life?” she asked. “You were not born a milliner. Diamonds, marriage, position?”

“Yet you hate your life. There are two black bonnets in that round box. You can amuse yourself with them.”

“Your eyes were hot, your mouth drooped. You have not a contented face. But you should be handsome.”

“I’m ugly,” the girl hastily remarked. “All white and black and red, like a poster. But I forgot——”

“Oh, I have heard of them,” the old woman dryly replied. She was aching to pour out a flood of questions, but she was too old and wise. She only sat as if she watched the girl make a new bonnet out of two old ones, deftly enough. She had an artistic touch, picked up goodness knows where.

“They call me Aunt Manette in this house,” said the old lady. “I do not know why. I cannot come to you again, madame; but will you come to me? I am always here—and lonely.” Since she had felt the lines of the strong, delicate face her own had grown very hard. If she were right Mr. Lovell should come here no more, hear nothing from her about the Dark Magdalen he was intoxicated over; this girl was for no penniless photographer, gentleman or not.

The fresh, homelike room had done Magdalen good; she had a queer liking for Aunt Manette—a curiosity, too, about her. She put the finished bonnet in her hand.

“The little boys will tell me that when I wear it,” Aunt Manette composedly replied. “I pay you with pleasure, though—for it and your society.”

“Oh, no!” said the amateur milliner hastily. “It wasn’t ten minutes’ work. I couldn’t take any money.”

“And I cannot run in debt.” She went away and came back with something in her hand. “You shall take this,” she said carelessly, a longing that was passion shaking her to see this girl’s face as she held out a little pin. “It is old-fashioned, of no value, but a pleasure to me to give away.”

It was an old lace-pin, set with discolored turquoises, [Pg 178]making an “N” on a dull-gold filigree heart. It was worth almost nothing at all, but Magdalen Clyde gave a cry of surprise. The thing was absolutely familiar to her.

“No, no! I would love it. But I’ve seen one—one just like it,” she wonderingly exclaimed.

“They were the fashion when my daughter was young,” almost callously. “This one is broken, as you see. They were worn in pairs, linked with a little chain.”

“I know,” rather dazed. It was very queer, but probably the blind woman was right and the things had once been common. She stood over Aunt Manette and smiled, a splendid sight of flesh and blood wasted on blind eyes.

“I’ll tell you why it surprised me when I come again,” she said. “I must go now.” She did not thank the old woman, for she knew by instinct that she was not meant to. It was payment—not a present. “I’ll come again some afternoon. I’d like to,” she honestly declared.

For a moment their hands touched and the blind woman’s were burning. It had been cool till she felt the girl’s face.

“Do not come after dark,” she cautioned. “Remember, it is not a fit staircase for you after dark.”

She hurried through the dirty lane outside and, when she reached her own street, stepped into a shop close to her own house—a dark little shop for second-hand jewelry.

Dull hair, black-and-white face, she flashed into the shop like something glorious.

“That,” she said to the man behind the counter, holding [Pg 179]out her turquoise pin, “worn linked to another with a chain—will you tell me if they were to be bought in every jeweler’s shop twenty years ago?”

He looked at it with a queer smile. He was rather a famous person in his way, an authority on his trade, and strictly honest, to the great gain of his dingy shop.

“They were not to be bought at any shop,” he said, putting down his magnifying-glass. “They were little badges worn by a certain set of ladies, among whom was the Empress Eugenie. That ‘N’ stands for Napoleon. If you cared to part with this,” he professionally suggested, “I could give you a very high price.”

“No,” said Magdalen, dumfounded; in her own box at home was the mate to this very pin, with a chain hanging to it, and the thing had been her mother’s.

She flew home to make certain she was right, but in the little sitting-room she stopped short.

“Dolly!” she shrieked and pointed to a door where no door had been. “What have——” She could not utter another word.

“Four customers came,” said Dolly gaily; “so I told them to come back this afternoon and I made my bedroom into a showroom for you. Isn’t it too beautiful? I just moved the bookcase on this side and my wardrobe on mine. Now”—complacently—“that big glass is some use,” pointing to it standing exactly opposite the new door.

Magdalen forgot her mysterious pin, forgot everything. She stood speechless in the little room she had dreamed of at Ardmore Castle.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” said Dolly crossly. “I nearly broke my back moving the things.”

Somehow Magdalen pulled herself together. Fool that she had been to have let Dolly take this place without seeing it; more fool still never to have found out that the bookcase hid a door.

“I can’t make hats, Doll,” she said slowly, untruthfully. “I tried this morning and I can’t. I’m sorry you bothered.”

“We can put them back. I only thought—we haven’t been getting on too well lately, Magda”—the little name came softly; there were real tears in Dolly’s eyes—“and it’s been my fault. I’ve been hateful. I—I wanted to do something that would please you.”

They were not sisters who kissed each other; Magdalen’s hand only fell softly on Dolly’s shoulder.

“I’ve been priggish and hateful myself,” she said soberly. “Don’t fuss about what you’ve been. I want to tell you something—about this room, I mean. I’ve seen it before, only till you moved the furniture I didn’t recognize it. I dreamed about it, looking just like this, and the Chinaman was in it, trying to kill you.”

“How could I? I dreamed about this place at Ardmore before I ever saw it or Ah Lee either. It’s—oh, it’s uncanny and horrible! Besides, I honestly think it’s a warning.”

“It’s horrid enough, but”—there was no superstition in [Pg 181]Dolly—“we can’t really ever believe in dreams. You’re sure you didn’t dream it after you saw Ah Lee?” privately thinking that people who saw ghosts and supernatural things often forgot details that did not suit them.

“Certain,” nodding her lovely, strange head. “I saw Ah Lee and this room as plainly as I see you now, and he was trying to kill you and I couldn’t save you. I felt his hands on my throat as I fought with him. Oh, Doll, do let us leave it! I’ll never have a happy minute here.”

“We have to give three months’ notice and we’ve paid our rent in advance.” But there was indecision in Dolly’s voice.

When a man has once tried to murder you it is not pleasant to have people dream he has tried to do it again, even though you have no faith in such things.

“Give notice, then, and let’s go. We’ll only lose that much rent. Don’t laugh, but ever since that Chinese butler came to Ardmore, bang on top of my dream, I’ve been frightened. I’ve felt as though I had a sort of second sight.”

“How could I be Scotch?” she cried. “Mother wasn’t, and you remember my father if I don’t. Mother always said there was nothing Scotch about him but his name.” She half closed her eyes, as if she saw again the face of the dead woman who had been Dolly’s mother and hers and was so like Dolly, so unlike herself. For a moment she wished she had seen her own father, who had left her mother a widow for the second time when she was a year old. She did not notice how sharply Dolly had [Pg 182]turned away, nor that when she answered her it was with her face to the window.

“Neither there was,” said Dolly with an unsteady giggle. She was horribly afraid as she stared out of the blessed panes that let her keep her back turned without seeming to. “Oh, don’t let’s talk about mother; she’s dead. Of course, I didn’t mean you could really be Scotch; it was just rubbish, because you talked about second sight. If you really feel nervous here we won’t stay.” She could turn now and she did. “I’ll do anything you like,” she finished feverishly; “anything! What do you want to do?”

“Go to the country. I can get a little house at Marlow by the week for very little. Let me get something to eat and go there now. I can get the next train.”

There were reasons why this proposition suited Dolly and that absurd dream was not the strongest of them. London was far from desirable when you dared not go anywhere. For once she helped to get lunch ready. She even saw Magdalen down to the street door; but at the foot of the stairs she paused and drew back into the hallway by the swinging baize door.

“Don’t be long,” she said as if for once she did not want to be left alone. “Send me a wire from Marlow if you can get a place and I’ll make arrangements about going away from here at once.”

Magdalen nodded, got into a bus at the corner of the street, looked up at a clock as they rumbled along and saw she must miss the half-past-two train, or take a hansom.

As she got down from the bus to hail one she did not notice another cab pass her with the glass down and the side curtains drawn; nor as she ran to her just-caught train at Paddington did it occur to her to glance at the first-class carriages.

To get out of Hare’s Buildings was her first thought; to see Lovell and tell him why, the second. She was certain, somehow, that he could help her.

But four hours later she stood once more in Paddington Station and realized that she had nothing to tell him but that she, Dark Magdalen, was afraid. For all she had got by her journey was a stuffy coming and going in a third-class carriage and the knowledge that in all Marlow there was not a house to be got. They were not out of Hare’s Buildings yet; and all the way up in the train her unreasoning terror of the place had been growing on her.

“I wish I’d gone to the Marlow Inn and wired for Dolly,” she thought faintly. “Anything would be better than another night at home. I——”

Her plan of going in search of Lovell was useless. From Paddington to Hare’s Buildings was a walk enough in the dusk without that trudge to Fleet Street that her pride recoiled from and only that senseless, gripping terror at her heart made possible. With a cab she could have done it; she dared not take the time to walk, with Dolly alone in that hateful house. She almost ran as she left the station. Suppose her dream had come true while she was out, without her part in it of fighting for Dolly!

Street after street, square after square, she hurried through; each hundred yards a mile; a relentless swallowing of the time—and something told her that she had not a minute to spare in this cold twilight. When she came to quiet streets she ran; at the corner of her own street she leaped forward with a little cry of joy.

There was no need to go to Fleet Street—never had been. There, standing under the sickly, flaring gaslight, [Pg 184]not ten yards before her, was Lovell—Lovell, who had helped her twice and would help her again.

It was not a dream or a Chinaman who could frighten her with Lovell at her back; her lips parted to call him.

She paused, flinched, nearly fell, and melted like a darker shadow into the darkness of an open doorway.

A man had come across the street with a slow, languid step—a gentleman of finer mold than was often seen in that border of the slums. And his face, under his immaculate silk hat, was the face of Lord Stratharden. There before her in the flesh were those pale eyes, those crooked, restless eyebrows, that smile that was not smiling; and as Stratharden laid his hand on Lovell’s shoulder the man she had meant to trust neither moved nor started.

For one swimming moment all the blood in Magdalen Clyde’s body was in her heart. Lovell and Stratharden!

Dolly—oh! Dolly had been right! She was sick and cold with the shock of it as she leaned against the wall of her sheltering passage; she could not move to save her soul, though only ten yards away Lovell was talking to Stratharden.

A voice she knew, a voice that ten minutes ago she would have followed to Hades and back again, steadied her like an electric shock. They were moving, coming closer, stopping to talk not a yard from her black doorway. Magdalen was motionless against the dirt-stained wall.

“Keith? No, I’ve not seen her.” Only there was a devilish coldness in his voice that she had never heard.

“Well,” Stratharden spoke silkily, “it isn’t of any importance, my dear boy. At least, I think not. Keith says it is and I’ve no doubt she thinks so; but the good creature had always a bee in her bonnet.”

There was no answer. Some one knocked his heel impatiently on the pavement and she knew it was Lovell.

“Did you come down here and keep me waiting half an hour to talk of Keith?” he coolly inquired.

“Not at all. I came down here because you wouldn’t see me at your photographer’s,” he answered airily. “Good God, Buff! you don’t tell me you live anywhere in this vile slum?”

“Buff!” In all her life she had heard of but one man thus nicknamed. Like a flash she heard Keith’s grim old voice in her ears: “Buff Ogilvie, Stratharden’s son? Oh, ay! he’s a good lad enough.” She hardly heard Lovell answering—and lying, though neither of his listeners knew it.

“I don’t live here. It seemed a retired locality, that’s all. You requested, if I remember, that it might be retired.”

“You’re very young,” he said; “younger than I was at your age! I came to tell you something. The whole thing will be settled inside of a month, but in the meantime I may as well tell you that at this present moment you are Stratharden. It is quite time, Buff, to—to throw over the trade of photographing.”

To the girl in the dark there was no knowing that the slow words would have been fierce but for the dread behind them. Father or no father, if there were truth in that dread——But the man’s mouth closed firmly. “I know how you’ve tried and failed,” he said after a long pause.

“I was mistaken,” Stratharden returned smoothly; if he were a trifle startled he did not show it. “My lady is as sane as you or I, and—damnably clever to a certain [Pg 186]point. Her limitation is that she never was my lady at all. Did you ever hear of a Mr. Starr-Dalton?”

“Starr-Dalton!” the mouth of the girl in the doorway was set harder than the man’s outside it. She listened like a caged fury, for this tallied too well with her own long thoughts.

“Oh, well, you’ll hear now to the infinite good of your pocket. Mr. Starr-Dalton is the back-bone of a sham antique furniture business—too much sham and too little antique. Also, he has been cashing my lady’s checks for her, which led to his discovery just when he was required on various charges of fraud. He babbled a good deal and finally—well, he can put his finger on Lady Barnysdale’s live husband. Live!”

“Lady Barnysdale’s live husband!” As if she were a child learning a language, Magdalen found herself painfully translating. What he meant was that Dolly—Dolly had a husband alive! She never heard Lovell’s answer—would not have cared if she had. Oh, poor Dolly! who had been starving, had been brave enough to play a game a well-fed woman’s blood might have failed her in! And Starr-Dalton had betrayed her!

Outside Lovell said something that carried no meaning to the girl, who was only thinking of Dolly. Afterward it came back to her terribly enough.

“I’m playing my own game now,” he said coolly. “I dare say it may tally with yours, if I know you. But it’s not yours any more than I’m Buff Ogilvie, till I choose.”

The whole thing had perhaps taken ten minutes; ten years without it would have taken less strength from Magdalen Clyde. The world had fallen down about her ears; Lovell, her lover, the core of her heart, was no better than Starr-Dalton, whom she had hated. Dolly——

“I must get home quickly to Dolly,” she thought, when voices and steps had gone, and she could dare the few steps that lay between.

It was a quiet street at night. She met not one soul—and remembered it afterward in another place. There was not a light in the house, nor a sound, as she fitted her latch-key in Madame Aline’s door. As it clicked behind her she called out chokingly:

“Dolly! Dolly! bring down a light. Where are you?” She was sobbing without tears. It was she who must tell Dolly she was found out, must help her to get away to-night, anywhere; Dolly, who was between the devil and the deep sea, and must face prosecution for bigamy, or worse. “Dolly!” she called again, and the sound of her voice came back to her.

In the dark senseless terror smote her. She felt her way to the stair foot; ran up half-a-dozen steps, fell; ran again, with her skirt torn and her breath out of her; called in the dark landing outside the kitchen door.

“She’s out!” she said to herself. It seemed impossible that anyone with a secret like Dolly’s should dare to go out. If it were true, there must be people who knew it; and Dolly—she might meet any one of them in the street.

Her fingers closed on the kitchen match-box, and the match she lighted went out, just as the electric light had that night at Krug’s, where one man at least had known Dolly; and Dolly had been afraid.

There was an unearthly neatness in the kitchen, a smell of yellow soap and charwoman; a look of—she flew from room to room, lighting the gas in each till it flared. Every single thing in the house was packed up—gone. Even her own clothes had vanished. Dolly was out, indeed; forever and a day.

For a moment Magdalen shook where she stood among Madame Aline’s fixtures, with the awful fear that perhaps Dolly had sent her to Marlow just to be able to do this in peace.

“That’s nonsense!” she said to herself feverishly. “Something must have frightened her. I was a fool to leave her here alone after telling her about that dream.”

What had Stratharden been doing in front, almost, of Dolly’s door? What had Buff Ogilvie been doing as Dick Lovell in Hare’s Rents? For all she knew there had been enough to frighten Dolly. With her fingers over her eyes she tried to think collectedly and could not. Thought after thought broke and raveled in her brain. In despair she spoke aloud in the desolate kitchen.

“Dolly’s gone! Stratharden’s found her out! Lovell’s Buff Ogilvie, Stratharden’s son.”

Her voice broke in a high, dreadful whisper. “And he kissed me! Oh, my God! He kissed me.”

She forgot she was hungry, tired to death. Under the unshaded gas-jet she sat like a dead woman who grows cold. There were lines on her face that no girl’s should [Pg 189]have—the awful marks it leaves to find out the man she has loved.

“He kissed me, and he spied on me. For what was that old French woman but a spy? I hate him. I could——”

With senseless fury she struck at the arm of her chair just as she could have struck at Lovell’s face or at his heart with a knife, for that matter.

Black murder was in her blood where she sat alone, for that blood was wilder than she knew. The horror of her passion passed and left her cold again.

“Lovell’s my business,” she said to the dirty gray wallpaper, “and I’ll have time to settle it. It’s Dolly who matters now. I’ve got to find her, and the best way is to sit here. She’ll find out how to let me know. If she even went to Marlow after me she’ll wire here when she finds I didn’t stay there.”

But it was only a sop to Cerberus; she had no real thought that Dolly had gone to Marlow.

“I could send a ‘collect’ wire if I knew where,” she thought with an ugly, mirthless laugh. “But I’d be a fool to go out even to the telegraph office. For all I know Dolly may only be round the corner; she might come back for me any minute. I daren’t be out.”

A clock Dolly had forgotten struck in the silence. Seven; it was only seven, and she had thought it the middle of the night. The homely, comfortable sound brought her awful loneliness home to Magdalen Clyde. In all London there was not one soul she could turn to; in spite of common sense, she sat listening breathlessly for Dolly; Dolly, who was miles away. Once she caught herself longing madly for Lovell to come that she might tell him what she knew, with the dreadful cleverness a cold anger that can neither forget nor forgive lends a woman’s [Pg 190]tongue. But there was small danger of his coming. Had she not made him swear to stay away when she thought he loved her? He would not come now when he had gone off with Stratharden to help hunt out Dolly’s shame.

Somehow she had no contempt for Dolly now; no one but a brave woman would have dared to act Dolly’s lie.

In the flaring kitchen her eyes fell on the black oblong of the uncurtained window; the dark of it held her gaze as a shining ball hypnotizes. A sound, the ghost of a sound, would have made her get up and lock it, fasten the shutters close; but there was no sound.

A curious smell, half sweet, half nauseous, like decaying lilac flowers, reached her by little puffs and eddies. There must be old flowers in the rubbish-filled coal-box; she could not take the trouble to look. There was a blank weariness on her, the stupidity that comes after dreadful anger. Down-stairs, in that room she had dreamed of, she would have had every sense awake; up here she gave way to the numbness that was creeping over her; if Dolly rang the bell now she would hardly care to answer the summons. The smell of those stale flowers was very strong.

Her head felt heavy; she leaned back in the stiff kitchen chair and rested it against the wall. The gaslight turned her strange hair into a glorious burnished halo, but under it the pale face was like a mask, with half-closed, unwinking eyelids. The queer odor thickened, lost its nauseousness, was sweet. To her tired brain it seemed to float in tangible drifts like thin smoke; it soothed her. She must be very tired to fancy such things about some dead flowers in the coal-box.

Of course, since she had overheard Stratharden, she had no fears for Dolly’s safety or Ronald’s. That danger was gone when lawful means would dispose of them; [Pg 191]for herself she had never had any fears; no one had anything against her. Everything seemed a long way off, very unimportant; there was comfort in the bare little kitchen that smelt so sweet; it was making her sleepy. The gas ceased to flare in her eyes, a gray curtain seemed to fall between her and the black square of window.

A—gray—curtain. It was like shutting her eyes; only nicer, much nicer; but, of course, they were shut since she was so nearly asleep.

If anyone had looked through that bare window—and it might not have been so hard, for beneath the window was a stone coping a foot wide and higher than a man’s knee—he might have seen an ugly sight. For the room was dim, indeed, with a mist that was thick, as it killed the air; and in the middle of it a girl sat asleep with her eyes open. It was too late for a sound to rouse her now if that was a sound behind her.

In her empty bedroom the light went out. A black, wavering thing slipped along the floor and down the stairs noiselessly. In the hall was the hat and coat Magdalen had thrown down when she came in; when the shadow had passed them they were gone. The lights were gone, too, all but a feeble glimmer that did not come from gas.

It was up-stairs again now, black in the gray kitchen. It held a candle close to those open, unseeing eyes that never winked. The window opened softly and presently stood wide.

But hours of air would not wake this pale girl any more than lifting her, dragging her head away from the rough wooden chair where a splinter had caught in the thick mass of her hair.

The kitchen light was out now and the sound of feet was audible, if there had been anyone to hear it. Not even a black shadow can go down-stairs quite noiselessly if it is real enough to carry a dead weight in its arms.

The fresh night wind blew in and out of the kitchen, in and out of Magdalen’s bedroom, and scattered some fine ashes through the dark. The clock struck ten, tremulously, as if it were afraid in an empty house, and over it came the shrill whirr of an electric bell.

A woman ran up the entrance stairs with a child in her arms and stamped her foot as she lighted the gas at her own door and saw a telegraph boy there.

“What good are telegrams?” she cried. “Here, give it to me! You’ve been hours.”

She went in as Magdalen had done, but in her face there was no surprise when she saw the house was empty. She had known it would be this two hours. She took a telegram from her pocket and stared at it.

The date was Marlow. And to Marlow had Dolly gone in haste and come back frantic. There was no Magdalen who had sent that wire. “A foreign-looking woman,” the man said at the telegraph office, “pale, with queer eyes.” And that must have been Magdalen.

With a self-control that came from blank anguish Dolly made a bed for Ronald and put him in it. Magdalen had thrown her over; she had said she wanted to live her own life, and now she was doing it.

She had not known it could hurt her so to find Magdalen no better than herself. For it must be that. She remembered the day Magdalen had come home transfigured [Pg 193]with that in her eyes no woman can either hide or counterfeit. She was too sick to be angry.

“She’s back! she’s no key!” Dolly flew to the door dizzy with joy. And on the threshold was Mrs. Keith.

Mrs. Keith; gaunt, dusty, so shabby—and with such a look on her face—that but for her voice Dolly would hardly have known her.

“Ye’re here. I’ve found ye!” she cried the instant the door opened. “Bring her here that I may speak with her. No!” and she pushed away like a leaf the door Dolly would have shut in her face. “I’ll have none of that; the time and the need’s over. Call her here, I say, if ye’ve sense in yer head.”

She had come in and closed the door behind her before she said anything but that “No!” She never even glanced at the bare disorder of the place as she sat down on one of the three chairs left.

Dolly stared at her, speechless with fright and anger. This was not the Mrs. Keith she had fought with, this old woman whose face was working, who wiped her hard eyes.

“Thanks be to Gude I’m in time!” the housekeeper cried suddenly. “It was just foreordained I should see ye getting in here.”

“What do you want of me? How dare you come here?—follow me?” she demanded. Her thoughts flew to Ronald on the sofa; if this strong old woman had come to take him she would claw her eyes out.

“I want nothing of ye,” said Mrs. Keith; with her old distasteful grimness she took in Dolly from head to toe. “Ye may die in the gutter for all I care. I want the [Pg 195]girl ye call yer sister. Have ye no wits, woman, that ye stand staring? Cry on her to come down.”

“I mean I know she’s not yer sister and never was. Call her down, ye daft woman. There’s no time to waste.”

“Who is she if she isn’t my sister?” If the words were defiant the voice shook. The unexpected attack had caught Dolly Barnysdale unprepared.

“That’s what I’ve come to see. And to save her life this night, for her look of one that’s dead, and the chance——Let her down, ye shaking atom; or will ye never understand!”

Dolly shook indeed. For once she saw things as they were and that this was no trick to steal Ronald. Mrs. Keith—and God knew why—had come here for Magdalen.

“Get her?” she almost shrieked it. “I can’t get her. She’s gone! What do you mean about her? What have you to do with her and her life?”

“Gone? I’ll not believe it.” The thankfulness disappeared from the gnarled old face. “Gone?”

“Go and look,” said Dolly. She went, from meaningless caution, to Ronald, and stood by him; but she knew all the while that, for some reason she could not comprehend, she and Ronald were no more to Stratharden’s housekeeper than dead leaves on a tree. She had not thought any old woman could run so frantically from room to room, could be back at her side with such quickness; nor that human flesh could wear so livid a fear on its face.

“What have ye done with her?” demanded Mrs. Keith and laid an iron clutch on her shoulder. “Did ye not [Pg 196]know from the day he saw her from my window that it was she, not you, that was in peril of her life?”

Dolly was shrewd enough. She knew like a flash that the woman was honest. Mad as she sounded, there might be—a bare might be, from a dim past—reason in her wild words. From where she sat beside Ronald she told Mrs. Keith all she knew about this day’s work and never thought of the irony of it. If this were Stratharden’s work, and the woman on his side, she would know it in any case; if not—all who were not against Dolly might be with her.

“And so,” she wound up, “after she said she wouldn’t stay here because of her dream, I went to Marlow after her, where I got her telegram from there. And she wasn’t there. But she had been, for it was she who sent the telegram. They said so in the office. ‘A woman with queer eyes.’”

Mrs. Keith’s eyes flashed green; but when she spoke it was as slow as dripping water.

“She sent you no telegram,” declared Mrs. Keith and tightened the hand she had never taken from Dolly’s shoulder. “Why would she, since she was here not an hour ago? Come yer ways with me.”

Dolly caught up Ronald and followed her, and in the kitchen Mrs. Keith turned on her.

“Smell!” she said. “Smell! or have ye no nose? And look here! Does a girl drag the hairs out of her own head?”

Dolly looked at the hard wooden chair, and long, fine strands of hair hung from its splintered back like a flame, sniffed hard at the air—and stood like a stone. When she left on that wild-goose chase to Marlow there had been nothing on that clean-scrubbed chair. Magdalen had come back and gone again. The queer scent in the room must have been something she had bought to make herself [Pg 197]fair for the man to whom she had gone. For, in spite of Mrs. Keith, Lovell, and only Lovell, was to Dolly Barnysdale the meaning of this day’s work.

“I suppose she caught her hair somehow,” she said bitterly. “As for the smell, it’s nothing but scent you buy in a shop.”

“It’s a scent ye’ll get in no shop,” the woman cut her short. “It’s——But why am I talking to ye? Answer me this before I go. Are ye on Stratharden’s side—ye that he told me was crazy?”

“Stratharden’s side?” she stupidly reiterated; then with sudden fury: “His side, when I was in fear of my life from him, and you know it.”

“I did not—at the time,” she slowly asserted. “Yer life’s safe from him now; he’s after other game.” Her face contracted with a sharp pang. “It’s her he wants,” she cried, “her! Speak out as if she were in her coffin and I may be able to save her yet.”

“I found it out. Ye’d no sister; your mother, that was Mrs. Deane, took in a woman and a child. The woman’s name was Clyde and she’d a little money. Your mother——”

“Maybe nothing. I know it all, that’s all. Now tell me the woman’s real name, for the fear of God.”

“I can’t,” replied Dolly. “Mother never knew it. Only Clyde. And Magdalen never heard of her.”

“There must be some one who knows,” she said chokingly. “And in the meantime she’ll die for her black [Pg 198]eyes and her red hair. You’ll never see her again—and I’ll go down to my grave with my work undone.”

“Stop!” said Dolly furiously. “You’re talking riddles. Who would hurt Magdalen if her name was not Clyde ten times over?”

“Stratharden’s heathen, that she dreamed of. That scent ye smell is his devil’s incense. Oh, my grief! and I stand talking here and know no way to turn to look for her!”

“Ye’ll be out of it to-morrow. Do ye not guess that it’s she Stratharden fears? Have ye no love for her that ye stand making talk? Was there nowhere she might have gone? But I’m no better! She could go nowhere with that scent of hell in the house.”

“Lovell,” said Dolly sharply. Mrs. Keith’s wild talk and her knowledge of Dolly herself had frightened her till she almost prayed she was speaking the truth. “I think she’s gone to Mr. Lovell; and I don’t know where he lives.”

“Because he’s a man!” she cried. “Because he had a dark skin and a hard mouth, and eyes that looked you through and through, and a way of moving like a tiger-cat, soft and quick.”

“Lovell, ye call him.” Mrs. Keith stood motionless. “A man that would throw back his head and look at you? That spoke soft and clean?”

“Then may the Lord have mercy on her,” exclaimed [Pg 199]Mrs. Keith. “Woman, that’s no Lovell, but Buff Ogilvie, Stratharden’s son, for I saw them together. They’ve trapped her, and ’twas me did it. Me!” Her voice rang harsh, anguished; she turned to run from the house.

Dolly, slim, soft Dolly, sprang at her like a cat. When Magdalen had hated that tigerish love of Dolly’s for Ronald, she had not guessed it would wake like this for her.

“You’ll not go till I know what you’re driving at.” She shook like a reed the woman she had feared. “Why would they trap her? Why do you talk nonsense about Ah Lee having been in a locked-up house like this? What has she to do with Stratharden?”

“I’ll not tell you,” said she, “till I find her. Why would I trust you any more than him, a light woman and a liar?” She shook Dolly’s hands off like water, and the heavy sound of her old feet came back as she ran, with trembling knees, down the stairs.

Lord Stratharden sat in his own bedroom in the little maisonette that opportune whitewashing of his had allowed him to return to as if he had never fled from it, and pursued a peculiar employment with interest.

On the floor beside him, and even in his preoccupation he was careful not to let cigarette ashes fall in them, were two open boxes, the entire wardrobe of a woman who, if she had little, had it dainty. Nothing was marked and everything was almost new.

Stratharden turned up the last layer in the last box with the patience of a man who is thorough, even though he expects nothing.

“My God!” he said softly, because in his youth he had believed in one. “This thing—and me!”

For he knew what he had in his hand as a man knows a trinket with which he has tried—and failed—to buy a woman. Only a bit of gold filigree with a turquoise N on it—a cheap offer for a woman’s soul and body if it had only possessed the value it looked and not a thousand thousand times more.

“So she kept it. She was a clever devil!” he thought, but the look of the pin made a devil in him as he held it. His world would have been loud in incredulous laughter if they had known what was in his mind. Never in all his variegated life had Stratharden’s soul or mind, or flesh even, turned with a real emotion to any woman but this one, who had only cared for another man. He [Pg 201]thought of the women who had given him all she denied him; was sick again as he had been in their arms, because there was no pleasure in any woman’s kisses but hers; cursed aloud because for all his pains he had been “faithful to her in his fashion” in many a gray dawn and midnight madness. Oh, he owed her a debt—a debt! Never in all his life had any woman quickened his pulses in him; never, try as he might, had he been able to care. It was a good debt—and he would pay it. Pay it so that Ninon’s rotting flesh should feel it in her grave.

“Her daughter!” exclaimed Lord Stratharden, and did not know his mouth was gray. “And I did it for the chance. I never, as God’s my witness, believed in it.”

But he believed now. He sat, an old man, racked with accusing thoughts. And Ninon had died young, out of her torture—and what his reflections were is not good to write.

A noise, that in another house would have been called brawling, brought him out of his thoughts in a flash. Quick as he was he had but time to get those open boxes into a safe place before the winning side in that loud fight was on him.

Mrs. Keith, her hand tingling from the crack that had blinded James, stood beside him. And the man who meant to put back the clock one way or another lifted his eyebrows at her in cool inquiry.

“Ye’ve done it,” she said, and it was not an answer; nor did she trouble to close the door. “Ye spied on me till ye found her out, and now ye’ve spirited her away. Ye and yer heathen, and Buff Ogilvie, that I thought his mother’s blood had leavened till yer own was out of him.”

Lord Stratharden shut the door and handed to her a [Pg 202]glass of neat whisky; and as he spoke the wonder on his face was real.

“Drink that and sit down. You’re exhausted. And then tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Ye well know!” She was breathing heavily and she needed the whisky, if it was her enemy’s. When she put down the glass her hand was steady. “Oh, ye well know, Stratharden! Ye can cease yer play-acting and yer eyebrow rounding. That girl that ye wanted—his daughter—brings me here.”

“Are you at that old story?” he asked slowly. “Poor Keith, it isn’t true. There’s no hope of it. That girl lives only in your faithful head. Do you think that I, hopelessly ousted myself, would not be glad to believe in it and give Barnysdale’s wife and brat the go-by, as you’d say? I would, indeed. But that red-haired, black-eyed Clyde girl is nothing but what she seems—Lady Barnysdale’s half-sister. Do you want me to see her? For I will with pleasure.” And he looked so guileless and truthful that she feared him as she had never feared him before.

“Bring her out then, if ye’d see her,” said she. “For a man who sent Buff Ogilvie to her and then took her by ye’re heathen, ye’re not overclever.” She had warmed to her work, perhaps aided by the whisky, and she forgot caution. She raved at him and told all she knew, and he sat like a stone till she was done. Then he touched her shoulders forgivingly.

“You’re quite foolish,” he said gravely. “As for the girl, she is only an impostor, and all you’ve told me is guesswork. What would I do with her? And as for Ah Lee, he left my service a month ago. I know no more of him than the dead. If she’s disappeared it’s——What did you mean about Buff?” he asked with a sudden [Pg 203]flash that seemed natural, though it had required a supreme effort to defer the question. He could not for his life see how Buff could be mixed up in it, and yet some words came back to him queerly.

“I’ll tell him!” She fairly spat the words at him. “I believe no single word ye’ve said. I——”

The room went round, turned dark; if some one fell Mrs. Keith did not hear the crash of it.

“Very like a fit,” said Stratharden musingly, five minutes after. “Queer stuff, whisky.”

He rang the bell and gave a kindly order. The old woman was such a faithful servant and apparently so ill; and he really could not have Buff told things by anyone but himself.

It was nothing to him that through that long night a girl was calling for Buff by a name his father had never heard, but it was important that Buff was the only person to be feared in the whole business.

“And that good Keith has forewarned me of him,” said Lord Stratharden, and went peacefully to his bed.

There is a drug in the hellish pharmacopœia of China, to prevent the further manufacture of which tender-hearted people should go on their knees and pray the allied powers may some day wipe the Chinese off the face of the earth.

The taking of it means death, very slow death. The burning of it—for it is primarily a gum and, made into pastilles with sawdust, has a smell that is half pleasant—is not a good thing for the person who sits in the smoke of it. After half an hour of that vapor it is impossible to move either hand or foot, to wink though a candle singes the eyelashes. But there is no insensibility in that paralysis, which is where the wickedness of the stuff comes in. Hearing, seeing, feeling the tortures of the damned into the bargain, the person stupefied can neither move nor cry out; even tears are stopped in them. The only trouble with the stuff, from a Chinese point of view, is that to use it twice in twenty-four hours spells death to the victim. And it is not always safe to have a dead body on your hands.

Thus every step of the way down-stairs was clear to Magdalen Clyde as her head hung down lifeless over Ah Lee’s arm. For she knew it was Ah Lee, though he was dressed in a woman’s black gown; she felt the hateful nails of his long fingers as he clutched her. What was the matter with her that she could not scream? Her heart felt as if it would burst in the dreadful effort; a cold pain shot, lightning-swift, through her limbs; and her thoughts—if she could think, how was it she could do no more?

It was all so simple. Ah Lee was taking her away. They were going down-stairs, turning not to the street, but to the green baize door.

What for? There was no way out there. The tailor would find her there in the morning; the man who carried her was a fool. It seemed hardly to matter that she could not, for some dreadful constriction somewhere, either move or scream. The cold air of the little dark room struck fresh on her face.

Ah Lee—she saw his face as he lighted a match, and could have shrieked with horror at something that surmounted his fishy eyes and smooth forehead—laid her down on the table like a parcel.

She felt as if she wrenched her bones out of their sockets as she tried to see what he was doing behind her; yet all the while she knew she had not so much as moved her little finger. That cold torture swept through her again, and she could not even grind her teeth on it. For a moment that alone, and it was quite enough, took all her attention. When it passed she knew that whatever Ah Lee was he was not the fool she thought.

“The ventilator!” She saw the beautiful case of it all like a flash, just as she saw before her the source of that draft she had been too stupid to find. In one corner of the room was a square iron patch, cut out into patterns; a bit of filigree, not a grating. As Ah Lee lighted a match over it the rush of air from it put out the flickering thing.

“The table was over it when I was here,” she thought with deadly recollection. “That was why I didn’t find it,” and the sweat of fear was damp on her hands. The Chinaman was going to put her in the cellar, and——

“That horrible smell up-stairs!” She could put it together now with dreadful clearness. “It made me like this. I can’t speak or move; I’ll be dead in the cellar—no one ever goes there.”

From where he had laid her on her side she saw, with the eyes she could not shut, Ah Lee rise softly from his knees; business-like and impassive, as if he had been handling the potatoes at Ardmore Castle.

He picked her up—living, breathing Magdalen Clyde, who could neither move nor cry—and carried her to the corner of the floor where there was no fancy iron cover now but only a square opening. In the black darkness she felt the edges of it as he——

God! God in heaven! Her feet were down that hole to her knees; his hands were round her waist; were under her arms! She was sliding like a log down to the unknown horror below. The filth of an unused cellar, the——She heard the scurrying of the horde of London rats as her head got below the level of the floor, while her feet still touched on nothing. Why did he not let her drop and be done?

For his grip was in her armpits still, and as she hung she felt his feet in their woman’s skirt pass her face. He was leaning down with her half in and half out of the opening.

Ah Lee, still clutching her with one hand—she had not thought a piece of smug yellow flesh could be so strong—was lowering himself with the other.

As she thought it the man made the quick drop of a gymnast, and with a trick of the arm eased her softly to the floor where he stood beside her.

Exactly as a bird watches a snake she watched him; she even wondered, through the cold fear that was on [Pg 207]her, how he had come to get her instead of Dolly. It was Dolly he had meant to leave to the rats in this place—able neither to scream nor move.

There must have been good stuff in Magdalen Clyde; she thanked God that Ah Lee had not got Dolly, even as she saw him put up his arms and lift himself half out of the open hole.

She would have shut her eyes if she could, not to see him go in the light of the match he held in his teeth. But she could only watch him till the match light died. He reached out for something, and then the dark hid him.

“He’s going,” she thought slowly. “And the rats will come.” She had always had a deadly, foolish terror of rats. She prayed God she might not die that death, but some other.

Something dropped lightly beside her; over her head was a sound of iron settling into its socket. In the deadly silence of the place a hand felt for her, very soft and slow.

“He’s going to kill me!” thought the girl; and was glad, because of those scurrying rats.

Well, but for Dolly left alone, what was death? Yesterday there had been Lovell, to-day there was only some burned-out ashes and a lie. It was not for Buff Ogilvie and his Judas kisses that she would fain stay in the world, though perhaps the thought of them added another pang to the going out of it. The awful terror of death that catches the heart and turns it over came on her. She was brave as women go, but a man might have winced at the slow touch of those fingers that had murder in them. They crept like loathsome worms from her wrist to her throat.

For a moment the Chinaman felt the stagnant pulse there. He grunted to himself, and as Magdalen Clyde waited for the blow that would end her—and perhaps it may be not written against her as cowardice that she prayed he might not bungle at the job—he stood erect and turned away. She heard him stepping across the cellar, and she knew now whose step that was which had waked her on a night now centuries past.

A little creak of wood sounded loud, but before she could wonder at it the man was at her side again. He threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and as he did it she saw where the cold draft came from that aired the tailor’s room. Just a common wooden hatchway, wide open, the starlit oblong of it bright as day in the black cellar.

Ah Lee grunted again as he shoved his corpselike burden up and through; climbed out himself with beautiful lightness and with business-like attention to details, lowered the lid of the cellar hatch to the proper angle and fitted in the iron bars that no one had looked at for months.

“We’re in the court between our house and Madame Duplessis’,” Magdalen thought swiftly, for that was where the cellar hatch must open. Flat on her back, on cold, greasy stones, she could not be sure, since all she could see was a star in a straight line over her. She could not move her eyeballs any more than if she and they had been cut out of white marble. But she could think and touch hell by it. Lovell, the blind French woman, and Stratharden’s Chinaman made a dreadful sum in her head. If Ah Lee took her to Lovell, who was Ogilvie, the horror of it would kill her.

For a long five minutes it seemed as if he could not make up his mind what to do. He stared about him with lack-luster eyes, and was at last sure the court was [Pg 209]empty. The only way out of it was through the passages of Hare’s Rents, and at this hour they would be deserted.

Ah Lee chose one of them, haphazard; pulled down a veil from his lady-like hat, and did not look so unlike the broken-down women with a pretense of decency who crawl along the pavements of the slums.

He picked up his burden very differently this time and was careful to stagger under it, as a woman might do who makes shift to carry another who is drunk or ill. Anywhere else some one would have stared curiously at the queer sight; Hare’s Rents was callous; also, it was out or in bed. But even Ah Lee hid against his arm the dreadful face and staring eyes of the girl he carried as he neared the open doorway that led through the Rents to the lane. Some child might shriek at the look of those eyes.

The horrible sweetness of the drug he carried hung about his woman’s mantle and half stifled Magdalen Clyde. She felt him come to a sudden pause and did not know that one word—that she could not speak—would have saved her.

For they were in the passage where an ugly gas-jet burned dim; and there, between Ah Lee and the street, sprung from Heaven knew where, stood a woman. She was oddly dressed, almost like a nun; and as she stood she stared.

The Chinaman opened his lips to speak, and with a quick change in his face shut them again. Those bright-brown eyes that glared so widely were blind!

Noiseless as a drift of wind he passed and was gone into the street beyond. Aunt Manette breathed softly through her nose, moistened her lips with a delicate, tasting movement.

“What an abominable odor!” said she to herself curiously. “But of course——”

Magdalen’s head, of its own weight, fell back from the Chinaman’s arm; her desperate, immovable eyes saw the French woman Lovell had sent to her turn away smiling.

Lord Stratharden rose with unusual alacrity the next morning. He had thought out all he meant to do and he had best do it. In the gray dawn he had had a sudden uncomfortable idea that he would have done better to fall in with Mrs. Keith’s theory that the red-haired girl was what the turquoise-studded heart—and other things—made likely. The sham Lady Barnysdale could have been made accountable, then, for her pseudo half-sister’s disappearance; she would have had good reason to be rid of her.

His line was right after all. Yesterday had been a hard day; the hardest thing in it to have those two boxes cleverly abstracted from the pile Dolly had left in charge of a porter. Lord Stratharden’s nerve had served him well while he held the man in conversation, and knew that behind his back those two boxes were going into a cab.

Dolly Barnysdale, in her desperate hurry to get home, never noticed that her luggage receipt was for three boxes and not five. But Lord Stratharden knew.

He was an utterly desperate man this morning as he tied his immaculate necktie. No one knew better than he what the woman whose money he had borrowed would do if he did not give her the return he had promised for it. But a desperate man is bad to fight and Stratharden knew it. He looked in silent consultation at his own face in the glass.

“The girl is—not likely to turn up!” thought he serenely. “My supposed sister-in-law will suspect no—no under currents—when she learns that a lady claimed those boxes. She will think of some man I feel assured. I will go first, then, to my lady; and put any thoughts beyond her own welfare out of her head. As for Buff——” He paused with a certain uneasiness. What Buff had had to do with that dark-eyed girl he could not get at unless it was the—usual thing.

“For Buff, the less he knows of the affair the better,” he concluded. “Thanks to neat whisky on top of exhaustion, our good Keith has had something very like a fit. I must send the doctor to see the old woman and explain to him about her harmless hallucinations. But I don’t know! She’s canny; she won’t be apt to talk. I’ll merely suggest that he suggests rest and nursing. So that our old and faithful servant won’t find it so easy to get out of my house and scour London to confide in Buff. There’s no one else to tell him. Gad, for all I know, he may be in love with the girl. Or else he’s more like me than I thought;” but this smile was less like smiling than ever.

He left the house so quietly on his important day’s work that James was too late to open the door for him.

That excellent servant was nonplused for a moment when he found his master gone, but his face cleared as he decided that what he had meant to tell him was probably of no importance.

“Anyhow, I couldn’t help it,” thought he, and turned back to his morning paper.

And Lord Stratharden, with a mind at ease, mounted Dolly Barnysdale’s stairs. He was more annoyed than polite when his fourth ring at the bell brought no answer. The fifth was more successful, since it nearly brought the house down.

“What do you want?” she demanded, and he realized he had never heard the real Dolly speak before. “What have you done with Magdalen?”

If Keith’s raging had not forewarned him he could never have let the second question pass as if unheard.

“I want to say unpleasant things,” said he softly. “My dear, foolish little woman, I—well, believe me, I feel for you!”

“How?” asked Dolly. She never moved an inch. “You did it. Keith said so. Tell me what you’ve done with Magdalen or I’ll tell,” and her tongue was venomous, “the whole town about Ardmore and what you tried to do to me—and Ronald.”

“I don’t,” said he slowly, “know what you mean. Who is Magdalen? And what has Keith to do with this matter? My good girl you’re dreaming! Poor Keith is in bed at my house, suffering from the fits to which she is subject. She came there last night quite irresponsible. Do you mean she had been here?”

“You know she was here.” Dolly spoke up bravely, but in spite of herself she was the least bit shaken. He looked so absolutely, politely puzzled. “And you know Magdalen is my stepsister and that you took her away.”

Lord Stratharden had in that one second of her recoil from him came into the little hall without either haste or pushing. He glanced about him before he answered perfunctorily.

“I never to my knowledge saw your stepsister in my life, except once from the window of Keith’s lodgings. If Keith, with an epileptic fit coming on her, told you any such nonsense as that I should wish to carry off your sister—though, of course, I don’t doubt she’s charming”—with a bow—“you must see for yourself that it is untenable. I should have no reason.”

“She wouldn’t say? Precisely. Her poor brain could not invent a reason. What, in common sense, should I want with your sister? I came, my good girl, on far other business.” The insolence in his voice was unmistakable.

“How dare you call me that?” Dolly cried. “No, hold your tongue! I don’t care what you call me. All I care for is that Magdalen’s gone—and I know she never left me of her own accord. She went to Marlow, and when I followed she wasn’t there.”

“You, or your son, who lied to her and called himself Lovell,” she hotly replied. “It’s all one. Keith said you’d both a hand in it.”

“My son,” he said, and it had been a knock-down blow to him to find Buff in the thing so heavily, “has five names. It’s immaterial to me which one he uses. I confess I should have liked to have changed my own name when I found how much mud had been thrown at it. But I don’t think you’ll find your sister with my son,” and he said it confidently.

“But she’s with some one,” Dolly flashed out. “Her boxes are gone from the station where I left them.”

“Did her sister never go off with anyone in haste and without leave?” he asked calmly. “That sort of thing usually runs in families.”

“It’s better than murder,” she said with her cat’s teeth [Pg 215]showing, “and that runs in families, too. I don’t believe a word you say to me. Come here.”

She cast a hasty glance at the locked door of the dining-room as she passed it and prayed Ronald would not find out he was shut in.

“Look there,” said Dolly, in the kitchen, where that strand of hair was darkly red on the rough chair. “And there”—in Magdalen’s bedroom, where a tiny pile of gray ashes was on the floor. “That was something your Chinaman brought—Keith said so. I don’t know why you sent him nor what Magdalen was to you, but she was taken out of this house by you. And I’ll tell that, and all I know, to the police. Do you think I didn’t know you tried to kill us at Ardmore?”

Stratharden drew a long breath, held it, and looked her in the eyes. It is a useful trick if you lower your head at the same time.

“I think,” said he, “that you are playing a very foolish game. It is nothing to me that you choose to invent lies about your stay at Ardmore—the whole countryside will know you for a liar in a day or two. But it is something to me that you should put your sister’s bolting with some man, on my, or my son’s, shoulders. I know nothing about the girl; she may be anywhere in London for all I know”—which was absolutely true—“and as for my Chinaman, as you call him, he left my service a month ago. For that,” he flicked contemptuously at the heap of ashes, “it is the remnant of a pastille, neither more nor less. You buy them at the chemist’s.”

“You needn’t try so hard to scatter it,” said Dolly, watching his stick moving in the gray ashes. “I’ve more. And I’m going to tell. No one, I don’t care who they are, [Pg 216]shall play tricks with Magdalen.” She shook with rage, but her eyes were fearless.

“Oh, of course not!” Stratharden assented with evil slowness. “Personally I should not, in your case, talk of tricks, since——I confess, if your sister knows all that I do, I can’t wonder she left you in some haste! Did you never, Lady Barnysdale,” with a stress on the name, “hear of a man called Churchill?”

“Then I think we will let him recall himself to your memory,” he quietly remarked, “in court. It was a clever plan, my good girl, but not workable. If I were you I should say very little indeed about your sister having left you; and as for your wild accusations—how much credence do you suppose a jury will put in a woman who never was Lady Barnysdale at all? Your son——”

Dolly was swaying like a fainting woman, but she leaped toward him at that word.

“You and Churchill can prove it,” said Stratharden. And Dolly Barnysdale winced from the blow. Churchill could prove it, indeed. And Magdalen—if Magdalen knew, no wonder she left a woman who was found out.

When Dolly lifted her beaten head Stratharden was smiling at her; just as if he knew that the one thing that would tell in her favor before a jury was something that—knowing him—she would have died rather than use.

There was very little look of such a seizure on Mrs. Keith’s face as she let herself softly out of his house at five o’clock in the morning. She stood and shook her fist at the closed windows.

“A common drunken woman,” said she grimly. “That’s what ye made of me last night and ye’ll pay dear for it. It’s not me that will need a dram this night!”

She was off down the deserted street with amazing speed for an old woman who had been drunk overnight and had eaten nothing for eighteen hours.

She had no money and no idea where to go to find Buff Ogilvie; no hope either of getting much out of him if she did find him, since he was his father’s son.

“I’ll go first to that queer woman who’s lost her sister,” she thought with a hope she knew to be a lie that the missing girl might have got home again. But it was nearly nine o’clock before her weary old feet took her to Dolly’s door; she stood looking up and down the street with hungry eyes for Magdalen Clyde, and saw no one but a man crossing the end of the square. Her eldritch yell brought the tailor to his window, but he saw no one either. Keith—and Heaven knows how she got there—was round the corner and clawing the arm of a tall man in blue serge clothes.

“Ogilvie,” she panted. “How come ye here? I’ve—but it’s no matter! For the sake of the mother that bore ye, and ye know what her life was as I do, what have ye done with my dead master’s child?”

“Keith!” The man stared in bewilderment. Haggard-eyed, trembling with exhaustion, he hardly knew the stern old woman. It was no wonder that he thought her distraught. “You in London!”

“I’ve been here weeks; but let that go!” There were tears in her eyes that he had never seen soften. “It’s a black business, Ogilvie——”

“I don’t go by that name,” he cut her off with a half laugh. “I’m done with the breed, Keith. My mother’s name was Lovell, and so is mine.”

“I’m not concerned with what they call ye. Ye take a queer way to be done with yer blood when ye mix in this business. What have ye done with that girl I saw ye with—her they call Magdalen Clyde? She’s gone, and Ogilvie, or Lovell, or Stratharden, I’ll get even with ye if I scream hell down.”

“Gone?” exclaimed Lovell. “What do you mean?” He made a step to go back to Magdalen’s home, which he had never entered, and the old woman caught his coat.

“Are ye in it? By the mother that bore ye?” Her eyes seemed to bore into his.

“In it? In her going? I! By God”—and she had never known him to swear before a woman—“I don’t know what you mean!”

“I’ll tell ye, then,” she answered chokingly. “No, not here—and not at her house. Stratharden, if I know him, is there now. Have ye nowhere ye can take me? for I fear me I’ll drop before my work’s done.”

“Yes,” he briefly replied. He put his arm through hers and guided her. “But what are you saying about my father? What has he to do with her?”

But she could not answer, and at his door in Hare’s Rents he picked her up like a child and carried her to his room. If the blind woman’s door was open as he passed, [Pg 219]he did not notice it, nor realize that the sound of his feet told that he carried a burden.

“Now,” he said, as he sat her down and shut the door, “begin! Where is Magdalen Clyde gone and what do you know about her? How did you know to come to me? or that I’m——”

“That——” The woman looked at him and the hard strength, the loyalty of him came home to her soul. “Ogilvie, Ogilvie,” she sobbed. “She’s ye’re cousin; she’s Ian’s, my Ian’s daughter. She’s Countess of Barnysdale.”

Out in the hall some one prayed in the breathing silence for hearing, with blind, fierce eyes.

“Ye were told so,” said Mrs. Keith. “I should know, since I was at her bearing. And Stratharden, who stole from me what I’d found out about her, knows, too. Think ye, when I find her gone and the hair of her head torn from her, that I would not guess at Stratharden? It’s she that Ardmore belongs to, and once she’s gone, ye’ll see that, by hook or crook, Stratharden will oust that feckless body, her sister—show she was, maybe, never Lady Barnysdale at all.”

Lady Barnysdale—that sister of Dark Magdalen’s, to whom he had scarcely given a thought! And Stratharden—he knew what Keith only guessed at about that ousting of Dolly. Father of his or not, if Stratharden had dared to meddle with Dark Magdalen he should pay for it.

“Tell me all you know,” he said, and his face was not good to see. “About her going away, I mean. I don’t care who she is—till I get her back again.”

He walked up and down as she poured out her broken-backed, disconnected story; a thing of shreds and patches picked up here and there.

“You that know her,” she cried, “did ye not see that she was Ian over again? Did ye not mind the likeness in the chapel? I stood her beneath it, and I marked her line by line.”

“I never was in the chapel. Was it likely I would hear much of my uncle Ian?” His look was absent as if this part of the story was nothing to him. “It’s yesterday I want to know about. What made you think of Ah Lee?”

“Do ye no mind the heathen scent of him? In his clothes when ye passed him? It was there in the room where her bonny hair had caught in the chair he’d taken her from. Did ye ever smell the like of it but with him?”

“To my father. Let me go, Keith. If what you’ve told me is true the sooner I’m with him the better.”

“To have him lie to ye as he lied to me—soft and quick. No, no! Go to her sister, Lady Barnysdale, and——Oh, man! do ye not see that all I’ve told ye’s but guesswork? We’ve got to get the girl in our hands and find out it’s true before ye face Stratharden down. And”—quickly, for he was not listening to her—“here is one who knows—a woman named Duplessis, that was——Heavens! who is that?”

He turned at the cry. Aunt Manette stood in the doorway, and there was nothing human in the look of her face.

“I—that woman!” she cried. “I—oh, yes, I listened, M. Lovell. It is my business more than yours. This woman here is right. I, who know it all, can tell you; [Pg 221]though, till I heard to-day, I could not put it all together.”

Lovell looked from one to the other. They were speaking of things that were Greek to him.

“I am her grandmother,” said Aunt Manette simply. “She is my Ninon’s child. And your servant here is right; where she is gone she was carried. I was last night in the passage, and there went past me, slowly and slowly, a man who carried a burden. And the scent from his clothes was one of the East, like sweet corruption. I, that am blind, stood there while he passed me by. Fool that I was never to know it was the Chinaman!”

The Chinaman! Why did she speak as if she knew the man? To Aunt Manette, in Hare’s Rents, “a Chinaman” should have come more naturally. Lovell looked from one old woman to the other, angry at their mysteries that he did not know.

“You are reasonable,” she cried; “we waste time. But tell me where it is that you are going.”

“Police.” There was enough of his father in him to make him careless whether he walked over his own flesh and blood, so that he had his dark love back again. That any woman should be at a Chinaman’s mercy sickened him; but that it was Magdalen sent him mad.

“Police,” said the blind woman with her hard daintiness, “will take time! We have no time. You and I, Mr. Lovell, will do better. If——You are Stratharden’s [Pg 222]son! Swear to me that you love her; swear quickly—that I may trust you still!”

Lovell, who cared for no man’s will, obeyed her like a child. The man was sick to the core, and perhaps did it mechanically.

“As she loves me,” he ended very low. But Aunt Manette believed him. She pointed a white finger at Keith.

“Go to her sister,” said she; “stay with her. The sister who is a stranger and may not be true. Keep her under your hand—till we come.”

Keith nodded. Nunlike coif, strange name and all, she knew Madame Duplessis now, the woman that had overturned a throne.

“I hate your father,” she said. “I hated his Chinaman. For years it has been my affair to know where they were that I might turn my hand against them; for between them they broke my Ninon’s heart. I that am blind will take you that are strong to that Chinese den where the police dare not go.”

“And at midnight not have found it! Sainte Vierge! must I tell you that I, whom you think half bedridden, am a blessed saint to those slums you never see? Where you could not go I can take you. Night after night have I smoothed their dying in those dens for nothing? Shall I not go where I please in broad day?”

It would be fighting for two women instead of one, but he did not say so. He was mad to be off, and if she could guide him it would save time.

At her door she bade him wait; and came out again with a decent shawl over her head; an old blue shawl that would bring half-a-dozen ruffians to her back at the [Pg 223]sight of it. She had not lied when she said she was a blessed angel in those slums.

“Take that,” she said, and put in his hand something that had an ugly glitter; “but do not use it unless you must. Trust your hands the good God made strong—for this day.”

He marveled, as Magdalen had done, at the way she threaded the streets with hardly a question; one hand on his arm, the other against the filthy houses they passed. And thus he forgot everything but Magdalen, for he who lived in Hare’s Rents and would have said he knew each inch of their neighborhood was lost after five hundred yards. Through filthy yards and unspeakable alleys the blind woman led him; by twists and turns, in sunlight and darkness—for twice they went in one door of a house and came out another—she hurried him on. He saw she counted her steps interminably, felt every greasy wall and doorway they went through, and when at last she stopped he stared.

They stood in a court, respectable after the reeking alleys they had threaded, an empty court with whole windows instead of broken ones; and a silence like death hung over their heads.

“Do not speak,” she muttered as she drew him swiftly into a doorway. “The place, each window, would be alive!”

She pushed the door, and it swung back on noiseless hinges. With her fingers on her lips she tapped on the blank wall at her side: five times—nine times—five times again.

No one answered, there was not a soul to be seen, but a door before them swung forward heavily. It had reason, for it was clamped with bronze outside and in.

There was still no sound, but there was something else. A burning, acrid smell that clutched the throat, a [Pg 224]distressing heaviness. Lovell looked at her and she nodded. He saw that she scarcely breathed for caution, and she motioned in front of her.

Down a long narrow passage—and that Chinese smell that is like nothing else in heaven or earth came up it—was spotless matting; ranged down it were clean straw slippers in orderly rows; opposite them boots that might have touched his heart at another time. Thick and thin, worn to holes, the boots of men who starve and freeze half naked, that the “black smoke” may lift their souls to peace. There were decent shoes, too, of Chinamen who earned an honest livelihood, but most were the shoes of men who “move on” eternally.

At the look in the blind eyes he understood, and left his own shoes in the orderly rank; he shook his head at the slippers; he would shuffle in them.

Aunt Manette felt the negative. She stooped and hid a pair of slippers in her dress, lest the keepers of the house should count them. He saw that she did not mean to take off her own foot covering; it was one person who came in, not two.

Never in his life had Lovell felt anything so strong as that silent bidding to silence in the blind woman’s touch. For himself he would have stormed through the house, wrecked doors, fought—but he knew the woman in the blue shawl was a better guide than he.

One door they passed, and then another; a third they crept by inch by inch; for inside it men spoke in a strange tongue.

The passage sloped down, grew dark. The woman who was always in the dark moved surely; sometimes he felt her stoop and place his feet where they should go. Down and down they went, by stairs that were ladders, round corners; till in the black labyrinth he knew, as a brave [Pg 225]man knows, that without Aunt Manette he would have come here in vain.

In the dark she stopped and listened. Very far off some one laughed—a wicked sound in that place. She drew him on a step or two, and held his hand while she felt above her on the wall.

“There,” she breathed in his ear. “Press up; in!” and as he did it some one laughed again.

“Quick!” directed the woman, and caught him that he might not fall forward, for the wall in front of him had slipped away like a card slides into a pack.

There was a dull light in front of them, a room horrible with hangings unspeakable; a man sitting half erect on a heap of mats.

“You!” said Lovell; and knew the laugh that answered him, though it was close instead of seeming miles away.

“So you’ve come,” said the bleached thing in the gaudy dressing-gown, without surprise.

“Mr. Churchill,” said Aunt Manette, who had half-closed the door behind her—and stood by it, a living wedge in the opening. “There is one—inside?”

“Ask Ah Lee,” he said listlessly. “As for me, I’m dying. But I couldn’t die with those moans in my ears. It was part of the bargain that I should die in peace.”

Lovell cursed him; and some rag of manhood came back to Bertie Churchill, who had mortgaged his last copper to Ah Lee for a place to die in.

“Be civil, Ogilvie,” he said; “it won’t hurt you. You were my pal once, you know. It’s queer how things come back to you.”

“Look within,” said Aunt Manette from the door. “The middle panel, behind that embroidered devil.” It was a god, but her fingers found it the other thing.

From instinct Lovell pushed as he had been taught outside, [Pg 226]but there was no light behind that curtain. In the dark he struck a match, and his heart shook in him. If this was where Magdalen Clyde should be——

“I can’t smoke opium, you know,” said Churchill softly, “because of my lungs. But I let Ah Lee think I do. He thought I was dead with it last night, I suppose, for he came and stood over me. I hate the sight of him; so I kept my eyes shut, and he went in there.” It was like a corpse sitting up and talking. “After a long time some one moaned. I—you fool, Ogilvie——” and there was in his face some remembrance of a day long dead that kept the others still. “I was a gentleman once! I couldn’t stand that moaning. I went in there; a white girl with red hair moaned at me for Dolly, and I knew a Dolly long ago. I knew, also, that Ah Lee had no business with a white girl that cried. I gave her brandy, for I can drink if I can’t smoke, and——”

“You took her out?” Aunt Manette was heedless who heard her. “You took her out?”

As if it were Lovell’s voice alone that could galvanize him into coherency he stared at her.

“I took her out,” he repeated vacantly; “but they caught her at the door.”

“Twenty-four hours it will last,” said Ah Lee to himself. “And he will drink himself blind when he wakes. It will do.”

He glanced angrily at Churchill, who was too long in dying, and drew a coverlet over his face. Asleep or not asleep, he need have no chance of seeing what Ah Lee went out and brought in; what he flung down in the wine room as if it were lifeless.

He had no orders from Stratharden, and he feared him as he had never feared God nor devil. He was in his own clothes now, and he stumped off for orders. When he came back he yawned with a huge indifference. If she could not help dying, she would die. To make her live, as Stratharden ordered, was impossible. There was nothing that would make that drug pass off before its allotted span.

“Twenty-four hours I told him,” said he, “and he will not come before. I will smoke and sleep.”

But he had forgotten something. The girl Stratharden wanted out of the way was made of good stuff. Clean blood ran in her; there was no weak spot, no flaw in her for the drug to catch in. And, above all, she was brave. In the dark room where he had left her she was lying like a log. She made no more of those efforts to speak or move that she knew resulted in unavailing anguish. Torture ran and crawled through every limb, as it was, but something made her know that it was people who struggled under Ah Lee’s drug who died. It might be better to die, but she would not help it on. Instead, she [Pg 228]prayed the whole night through, with Dolly—only Dolly—in her thoughts.

She must live for Dolly, help Dolly; pay Lovell—who was Stratharden’s son—for each pain that rent her slim body. And at five in the morning a cry she did not know was her own voice come back to her, and sent the cold drops out on her forehead.

“Dolly!” she heard again, and knew she could speak. She said the word over and over, like a nun in a litany, not in despair, but to keep herself brave. “Dolly! Dolly!” and then sat upright with a pain that turned her cold. She must die here after all.

For there was a light in her eyes—a dreadful stooping figure in a gaudy draping, coming toward her; the dazzle of it made her spring up to face Ah Lee.

“You’re English,” she muttered, and found it difficult to make her tongue obey her.

“Did you come here to smoke?” said the man listlessly. “You’re too young.”

“Take me out! Take me away!” She caught at him with her hands that she could not guide. “They brought me here. Dolly!—Oh! get me back to Dolly!”

“You’re a lady,” said Bertie Churchill. “A lady—here!” He turned away, and because she thought he was going to leave her she staggered after him, clutching at him with wild words.

“Hush!” said the man with one of those queer revivings of a dead self. “I’ll take care of you. Drink this.” To her mouth he held the brandy that he courted death with, and made her swallow it drop by drop, till there was heat, not ice, in her stagnant veins.

“Now tell me why you came,” he said watching her. [Pg 229]It was a long time since a lady had drunk from Bertie Churchill’s glass.

She told him in slow whispers; but she was getting supple now; her fingers could hold the glass that at first they had let fall. But it seemed to her that he gathered no meaning from what she said.

“Don’t you see,” she cried desperately, “that he means to kill me? Can’t you help me to get back to Dolly? She will be—they’ll ruin Dolly! I heard them say so.”

“Ruin Dolly,” he repeated. He started as if he had been stung. “Dolly Deane,” he said as if to himself. “I saw her before I came here. I wonder why I—but that’s a long time ago.”

“What do you know about Dolly Deane?” she exclaimed. She looked at him, and for the first time recognized his face.

“You’re the man!” she said recoiling, “that called her—that made the noise at Krug’s restaurant! What was Dolly to you?”

“Nothing,” was the old instinct to lie coolly for a woman. “I was drunk. I don’t remember anything about it.”

A quick thought took her—and if Ah Lee’s drug had any good in it, it was that it sharpened the wits.

The bow he gave her was grotesque in his red dressing-gown; but she was only looking at his face.

“Did you marry Dolly?” she demanded. “They say you married Dolly. They’re going to prosecute her for bigamy.”

“She’s young still,” he said; “I saw her at Krug’s and [Pg 230]it made me mad, for I’m old and dying. But bigamy—she knows I never married her! I spent her money and left her like a cur. I used to wake up in the night and think of her—little Dolly, who was a fool and pretty, and loved me, till I left her to die in the gutter. And then I saw her at Krug’s, well dressed and young. Tell her——”

“Come away. Take me out and come to Dolly!” she broke in. “Say you never married her!”

“I never married her,” but the flash of life in him was gone. “I can’t come,” he said courteously. “I belong here, you know. It seemed warm and no one worries me. But you must go. No white girl should be here.”

He moved to the side of the room and touched it gently. Nothing gave and an ugly light came in his eyes.

“Locked in,” said he; “which was not in my bargain. But Ah Lee forgets.”

He fumbled in the folds of his wrapping and brought out a thin, strong wire. With a dexterity that spoke volumes for the life he had led he did something to the door.

“My patent, that Ah Lee forgets he bought from me,” said he. “Allow me,” and he took her hand.

At the top of the long labyrinth of stairs and passages he stopped; he pointed to the rows of boots at a door.

“Past those and two others,” he said. “I will stand between them and you. When you get to the door in front of you knock on the right wall. Five taps—nine—then five again. They’ll let you out.”

“Come,” she whispered, white lipped. “Come away from this dreadful place. Save yourself as well as me. For God’s sake, come!”

There was something dignified in his ravaged face; something, too, that agonized her with pity. He, half dead himself, had saved her; would stay here and bear the brunt of it.

“Mr. Churchill!” she begged, but he hushed her; he held out a hand to her and drew it back.

Magdalen Clyde—and to the day of her death she will be glad she did it—stooped and kissed that shadowy hand—bade God bless him to eternity and knocked at the bronze-bound door.

It swung back as he had said it would do. She went through and was in another passage with another shut door before her. She looked back for guidance to Churchill, but the door between them was fast. She knocked again with shaking fingers, lost count and hesitated.

The door before her opened, then began to close with dreadful swiftness. She leaped to it, shrieked, was caught and tore her gown away.

Behind her rose a quick sound of opening doors, of flying feet. All round the court faces, and such faces as nightmare knows, filled the windows; a man rose as if by magic in her path and she flew by him.

The morning daylight dazzled her and saved her, too, for once out of that court—and she never knew that she struck savagely at men and women who sprang out of doorways—the streets were empty.

Blundered into alleys and out again; ran on and on, she cared not where, but away from Ah Lee; and dropped at last as a driven dog does that cowardly people say is mad.

Like a dog she lay and panted, the blood beating in her as though her veins must break. It was not seven [Pg 232]o’clock yet, and the stones she lay on had the chill of the night. Where she was, she neither knew nor cared, so that she was out of Ah Lee’s house. No one passed in the empty street and at last her sickening pulse-beats ceased to shake her.

From somewhere there came a footstep, coming nearer, stepping flatly without heels. She raised her head, looked one way and the other and could not get to her feet. A Chinaman turned into the street, looked at her impassively and took to his heels.

“He’s one of them! He’s gone to tell Ah Lee.” She would be caught in who knew how little time. “I——” She wrenched herself till she stood up and stared round her. She did not know where she was; she dared not run one way or another; could not have run had she dared.

Hatless, her hair loose and matted, her black gown torn, she stood still. To knock at these decent doors would result in her being turned away for a drunken outcast; there would be no pity in these snug houses; Ah Lee might be on her before she roused the inmates from their beds. Were there no police in London? Was all the world asleep but she and Chinamen?

She looked down at her bedraggled clothes, and knew a policeman would arrest her and consider her story a drunken lie. There would be hours lost before she got back to Dolly.

Magdalen turned and saw a milkman coming toward her with his cans in his hands. He was a big man with a kind face; he whistled as he poured out and left his milk. With a quick hand she straightened her hair and caught up her dress to hide the rents. The milkman looked at her.

She shook her head. He would think her mad if she asked to drink it from the can.

“I’ve lost my way,” she said. “I want to get to Featherston Street and Hare’s Buildings.”

“You’re miles off,” with a bewildered look at her. “Been out all night?”

“I suppose you’re used to it,” half kindly; she must have been a pretty woman when she was sober. “I’m about finished here. If I show you out to the Northend Road can you find your way?”

“Well, step on,” he said with a laugh. “I guess my character’ll stand it. There ain’t no one up, anyhow.”

She shook as she followed him; and if she had told him why he would not have believed her. But he was better than his word.

“This isn’t the Northend Road,” she said as they came out on a thoroughfare and she saw the safe and blessed omnibuses going to and fro.

“Wasn’t no use in going there if you’re in a hurry to get to Featherston Street,” he gruffly answered.

“This is nigher. You get into a red bus and you’ll go straight to Charing Cross. Oh, it’s only a step out of my way—you needn’t thank me.”

There was nothing but a penny in her pocket and she must keep that. She asked him his name and he laughed.

“No matter. I don’t want you round my way,” said he. “You take my advice and stay home of nights. Here’s your bus.”

There are few people to whom the inside of a stuffy [Pg 234]bus seems heaven; but it did to Magdalen Clyde. Her penny would take her only to Hyde Park corner, but after that she would be safe. No one would dare to lay hands on her from there to Hare’s Buildings.

How she walked it she never knew. People turned their heads, but no one stopped her; her feet kept on mechanically, that was all. “Hare’s Buildings!—Dolly!” she said to herself over and over. It was not till she stood in front of them at ten o’clock in the day that she remembered. Dolly was not there.

She turned her head like a hunted beast and knew that lonely house was her only refuge, felt her latch-key in her pocket and ran up-stairs.

The green baize door swayed under a yellow hand. Ah Lee with his fish eyes alive at last had followed her. He had his own debt to pay now, not his master’s; and he had nothing to lose by doing it. Churchill had been right, after all. Magdalen Clyde would be “caught at the door.”

Lord Stratharden took one long, comfortable glance at Dolly Barnysdale before he turned to go. He had half a mind to tell her that Starr-Dalton had betrayed her into his hand; but there would be time enough for that in court.

He sighed with pure content as he left the room and Dolly never lifted her head to look at him. Ardmore was a bare place, but he need never live in it, and it would be good to be Barnysdale with money instead of Stratharden driven to death. He was even careless of the price he had promised to pay for that loan that was tiding him over. To Ian’s daughter he gave no thought. Ah Lee would keep her safe till he was ready to dispose of her.

As he opened the door to go out her hand was on the bell; as he caught his breath with astonishment she was inside. She swept the door from his hand, banged it and put her back against it.

“Ye may well glower,” said she. “It’s me and it seems I’m just in time. No; where ye are ye’ll bide,” for he put out his hand to wave her aside. “I owe ye no obedience.”

It was really in pure astonishment that he stared at her and then his wits came to him.

What the housekeeper was thinking of would come [Pg 236]to nothing. There was no earthly chance that that girl’s disappearance could be brought home to his door, even if they caught Ah Lee. This was as good a place to be in as any, since it was natural enough that he should come and confront the woman who had swindled him out of his inheritance.

“I didn’t know this was an international affair,” he said with his familiar sneer. “Pray don’t excite yourself. I’m perfectly willing to stay. But disabuse yourself of the thought that I can be bullied by a servant. I stay because I choose.”

He had reflected hastily that while Keith was here she could not be hunting the town for Buff. He had no desire for Buff’s comments on a story that was absurd on the face of it. It was abominable luck that had mixed Buff up with the girl. It amused him to see that Keith never took her back from the door.

The sound of a strange voice had roused Dolly from her dazed terror up-stairs. She ran down, only stopping for Ronald.

“No,” she said slowly, and it was all he could do to keep down a grimace of contempt. “But sit ye down. I’ve a story to bring to the memory of my Lord Stratharden, and ye that were never the countess had best hear it, too.”

“So you own that much,” said Stratharden. It was perfectly immaterial to him what she told, since the only proof of it—and that a trifling one—was in his house at home. He looked round the bare little entry with its one chair. “Is it necessary to sit all of us on that? I fear it will be a long story.”

“Go, can’t you?” said Dolly fiercely. “What are you staying here for?”

“For news of your sister,” and she winced as she was meant to. He walked coolly into the dismantled sitting-room, with its door open into the ill-omened showroom Magdalen had never used. He had no desire to stop Keith; it was as well to make sure how much she suspected, for of course she could know nothing.

Keith followed him like a cat a mouse, fearful that he would get away. Dolly, with one look of hatred, turned away from them both. Did they think that with Magdalen gone and herself found out she would listen to any old stories politely, as in a drawing-room? She clutched Ronald to her and walked into the desolate showroom, where no furniture but the pier-glass remained. What she had done she had done for herself; it was only to use a dead woman’s confidence, and yet be not so unworthy of it, either. But she could never right the wrong now; the only thing left to her was——

“I’m glad I lied,” said Dolly to herself; “glad! If I hadn’t I couldn’t save Ronald now. If Magdalen would only come back I’d be happy—yes, happy!” She stamped her foot with sudden rage at herself. Why was she standing here doing nothing?

“I won’t believe she meant to leave me!” she thought. “She wouldn’t do it. What do I care for Stratharden—for anything? I’ll go to the police.”

“Will ye no come here and listen?” Keith’s voice broke in on her. “It’s worth yer while.”

“What do I care for your stories?” she cried. “You said you came here for Magdalen—that you loved her. Why don’t you do something instead of standing like a [Pg 238]log in my house. I’ve enough of you and your mysteries. I’m going to the police.”

“Ay, mistress, but have patience,” said Keith softly; and iron-nerved as he was Stratharden started.

None of the three heard a dragging step on the stair, the soft sound of a turning key.

On the threshold Magdalen stood speechless, her pale face sodden, her eyes like dark coals. There, with her back to her, was Dolly! * * * Dolly! Had it all been a hideous dream that last night she had found this house deserted? Why was Dolly so still? What made the house so silent? If there had been anyone behind Magdalen Clyde, creeping to her foot by foot, they might have thought she stood alone.

In the little room Keith stood before Stratharden, her back toward the door that gave on the entry where Magdalen stood, her ungainly body between it and him. But under her arm, through the showroom door, he saw Dolly’s face as she wheeled.

“Sit ye down!” shouted Keith. She sprang on the man who had been her master. “Ye’ll not move from this place!”

“Magdalen, move! move!” She flung Ronald on a chair and ran to that ghost-eyed girl at the door. But she was too late.

Magdalen had turned, had met Ah Lee’s spring that he meant for her back, and was on the floor. Tooth and nail, in the house of her dream, that dream came true. Over and over, up and down, she was fighting with the [Pg 239]Chinaman, his yellow fingers writhing every instant a little nearer to her throat.

Dolly’s shriek broke off in her ears as if it had stopped in the middle. There was a darkness in her eyes—then utter silence. The struggle was over and she lay still.

Lovell, and it was the last day he would ever call himself so, stood speechless in Ah Lee’s opium shop. Beside him was a sergeant and half-a-dozen policemen; in front of him some rags of humanity with their smoke still in them. There had been such a raiding as never was known in their memory, but for all that there was despair on Lovell’s face.

Whoever they had, it was not Magdalen nor Ah Lee. Churchill had told the truth; she had been taken elsewhere. What had become of the French woman he neither knew nor cared, except that neither he nor the police knew where to go.

“He’s conscious,” said the doctor some one had brought. “He wants to say something. Is your name Ogilvie?”

It was, to his shame. To his shame, too, he had forgotten the man who lay down-stairs, dying for Magdalen Clyde. He ran down quickly enough, with a policeman’s lantern to make the way plain.

Bertie Churchill, in his scarlet dressing-gown, lay on the mats that were redder still. The salt, acrid smell of blood rose over the reek of brandy, but the little that stayed in the dying man had been England’s best.

“I’ll only keep you two minutes,” he whispered. “I was wrong about her; she got away. That’s why I’m here.”

“I thought when you were here they’d got her at the door. She knocked instead of going straight through; it’s never locked. But they didn’t, and they couldn’t wake Ah Lee from his opium to tell him she was gone. After you’d gone he came here—he—in the middle of it,” with a glance at his side and the blood on the floor. “His son came in. I was pretty far gone and they spoke their lingo, but they used names of streets. She must have got as far as the Northend Road; they jabbered of it. The boy was saying something else. ‘Buildings—Hare’s Buildings.’ Know about it? I could open my eyes then and I saw Ah Lee’s face. He cut at me to finish me before he went—there, I suppose! You’d know,” he concluded very wearily.

“She lives there,” said Lovell sharply. He caught Churchill’s hand with the dew of death on it. “What is it?” he said. “Is there anything you want before I go?”

“She said ‘God bless you’—to me!” It was as if he were very far off. “Don’t go.”

“Dolly,” said Churchill very loud, “I’ve paid. You said I’d pay and I’m paying. I’ve been damned alive ever since that day I said I never meant to marry you.”

Lovell started. He had never thought of this Churchill and Magdalen’s sister, who was Lady Barnysdale. He remembered the restaurant and Churchill’s face as he called.

The lights were out indeed for Bertie Churchill; his days for good and evil were over, and for the evil, as he said, he had paid.

Lovell stumbled as he went up-stairs. For this thing and many others his father was responsible, and, for all he knew, for a blacker thing yet. He turned his back on that dreadful house and ran, as he had never run in his life, for Hare’s Buildings.

He had no hope she would be there. It was perhaps to find nothing had been true in the things Churchill had said that he was going. But he went—a splendid sight to see, deep-ribbed and lean-flanked, he ran like a buck in spring. But his dark, hard face was not so good to see.

He was there, past the tailor shop, half-way up the stairs, when some one screamed.

Shriek after shriek rang through the open door; but, mad as he was, he knew the shrieks were not Magdalen’s. He was in the room before he saw her; saw Dolly on her knees over Ah Lee, clawing for his eyes.

His hand pushed her away like a straw. Silent as death, and as terrible, it struck Ah Lee once, and twice. The man’s convulsed face straightened as if the fury had been wiped on it, his rigid hands fell lax as his body swayed backward. But Stratharden’s son never looked at his father’s servant.

Without a word he lifted Magdalen like a child; laid her down, anywhere, but away from that filthy, yellow carrion on the floor, and put his hand on the swollen throat that had been so fair.

“Water, quick!” he exclaimed. There was a trampling on the stair, but he paid no heed to it; it was Dolly who banged the door as she ran past.

“My God, Keith!” he ejaculated. “Why didn’t you help her?” He felt the quiet pulse, and his stern eyes might have made any woman cower. But not Keith.

“May be I fought, too,” she said bitterly. “She’s but fainted; he had not a clean grip of her.”

Faint or no faint, he would have her out of it. There was no tenderness in his face as he worked over her, only stark, raging determination. And it was on that look of Dick Lovell’s that Magdalen opened her eyes.

As her senses came to her she recoiled from him and would have sprung away but for the deadly coldness that kept her still.

“You!” she muttered, and there was horror of him on her face. “Take away your hand! I know your name!”

“You!” he exclaimed. He looked from the girl who had turned from him to hide her face on Dolly’s breast to the man who had made her do it. Ronald, forgotten and bewildered, crept to his mother’s side. No one else stirred.

Stratharden nodded slowly. He was very white about the nose and his eyes were narrow.

“I did not come in time,” he was breathing very slowly. “I——Is that Ah Lee?”

“Well you know it is,” she said. “Ye need not hush, Mr. Ogilvie. I’ve served him well these many years, but I serve him no longer. I’ll say my say now that my mistress there may hear it.”

Her mistress. Did she mean Dolly? Magdalen raised her head and saw Ah Lee lying as he had fallen.

“Let him be,” said Keith. “He’ll no die. ’Twas Ogilvie here that stunned him,” but at that name Magdalen only turned away her head. “She’ll not look at ye,” said Keith. “My lamb, ye must hear me! Ye mind the picture I showed ye? That ye were the spit and image of?”

Magdalen lay dull eyed. What had a picture to do with her and Lovell, who was Stratharden’s son?

“’Twas Ian’s picture,” she said. “Yer uncle, Ian Ogilvie. Oh, ye’ll not know, as I know, how he that was the son of the house fared at the hands of Stratharden and his mother! He was the first-born; his mother died; but ye’re grandfather married again. Stratharden here was but three years younger than Ian; Barnysdale, that was married to her”—with a look at Dolly—“but one year. And had it not been for me little would Ian have had in his father’s house.

“He always laughed it off when I said the things that were on my tongue, but hell was his boyhood, thanks to the stepmother set over him—and hell his manhood, by Stratharden. They gave him—his father and stepmother—neither schooling nor money. A room in the house, a bite with old Keith in the kitchen, was all he had. And one day he left those. He was a grand man to see when he was come to his growth; darker than her, but her living image. I mind I prayed for him by night and day when he left me and went to sea.

“Your Barnysdale, that was Stratharden then,” she motioned to Dolly, “went off, too, to college and to worse; we heard no more of him. Stratharden here bided at home by his mother’s apron-string, and, as she bade him, he married. And when Ogilvie here was two years old a letter comes from Ian. And he was married, too.

“We went to him, David and I, and a bonny thing his wife was. Ninon, he called her. I mind how her mother looked at her child the day it was born. ‘Black and white and red,’ she said laughing, and black and white and red she is still. But I had not cast my eyes on Ian before I saw that he was dying. Poor they were and very poor; for the mother, that was Madame Duplessis, had lost her money in the French war—they say she lent it to overset Napoleon—I cannot tell. And while I was trying to keep the life in Ian, that was worked to the bone keeping his wife, in walks my lord here. Ay, well ye know it!” she turned and towered over him.

“Ye sowed distrust between them, or ye tried. Ye gave her a jewel that was a secret sign of the friends of Louis Napoleon; she wore it, and her mother’s people, that were Orleanists, would do no more for her. Ye cut one thing after another away from the feet of Ian’s wife, that she might turn to ye. But she did not turn. He died in her arms, with her head on his breast, and oh! I mind that ye gnashed yer teeth to see it. Even then ye had yer heathen with ye; though I never knew where ye found him, for it was not till after that ye traveled the wide world round. And it was fear, black fear of ye and him, that sent my Ian’s wife away in the night in secret with his child in her arms. Well I might have guessed what ye had in yer heart, for I knew ye; but she was too clever for ye at the last end. She ran away from the mother that bore her for fear ye would damn her, soul and body, and cast disrepute on Ian’s child.

“What was it blinded the mother of her that night we found she’d gone? Blinded her in the street as she would have sought the police? Who was it came to me with soft words and a written secret from a hospital, to say Madame Duplessis had died there? Ay, ye know! And, dead or alive, neither mother nor daughter nor grandchild [Pg 246]ever came back again. We were poor, David and I; but we wore our feet to the bone seeking them. It was not till ye’re father was dead and ye’re brother set in his shoes that we went back to Ardmore, and then only that we were starving and hopeless of finding Ian’s child.

“For sixteen years I heard no word of her, till Barnysdale died, too, and ye told me that his wife was mad and ye would bring her home to Ardmore. I was to keep a guard on her, and I kept it; for the honor of the house of Barnysdale, not for ye. Ye little knew that she was bringing with her the daughter of Ian that I loved”—pointing at the girl in Dolly’s arms. “Nor did I. But when ye sent ye’re heathen to the house—and I saw the living flesh and blood of Ian under my eyes—and ye did yer best to drive her and Barnysdale’s wife into the Clyde—I knew. Oh, I knew! And ye sent me to London to track them; I tracked them well. I found from the manager man that Dorothy Deane that danced and married Barnysdale had no sister. I found elsewhere that another Dorothy Deane had acted in that same theater—and she had a stepsister, they said, at a convent. And in the convent they told me what none knew but them. To Mrs. Deane’s house had come a woman and a child; the woman died there, Mrs. Deane kept the child, Clyde, and said it was hers. It was said she was married again, but none ever saw the man named Clyde. But Clyde was the name Ian’s wife had banked her money in, and a Mrs. Clyde drew it. And when she was dead Dorothy Deane spent the rest of it. And that I did not hear in the convent. Is it true?” Dolly drew a long breath.

“It’s true,” she said. She waited for Magdalen to turn away from her as she had from Ogilvie; but Magdalen clutched her fast.

“She did her best,” she cried sharply. “She was a good mother to me—she was kind and I loved her.”

“All this,” said Stratharden quietly, “has nothing to do with the fact that Lady Barnysdale here is a liar and a swindler, who never was Barnysdale’s wife. I may tell you—Mrs. Churchill—that your husband is alive. Your friend, Mr. Starr-Dalton, knows it.”

“Churchill!” cried Dolly, livid. “You threatened me because of Churchill. He never married me; he——” She stood breathless, and if ever any woman wrestled with temptation it was she. Magdalen was Lady Barnysdale, there was still money and comfort for Dolly, and respect if she held her tongue, unless Churchill——

“I never was married in my life,” she said. “No, don’t stop me,” as Lovell would have spoken. “I never was married, either to Barnysdale or to anyone else. There were two Dolly Deanes; one was a success—I was the failure. I was only a chorus girl. My name was never in the bills. I was dismissed; Churchill threw me over. I went to Hastings to die there—and the other Dolly Deane found me. I was at my last penny, and when she married Barnysdale—she, not I—she took me with her as her maid. I was with her when he left her—with her when she died. I promised her to see Ronald righted—her son, not mine. Those papers I had were hers, just as he was. I was afraid of Churchill; I was afraid to go to a theater, for fear some one would know me. But I’m not afraid now. Send for the man and ask him, for he knows. I can tell now, because Ronald will not fall into your hands.”

“Other people shall know, too,” he said. “That, and this mad story of Keith’s that I will prove a lie.”

But he was too late. A group of men were in the doorway; in front of them Aunt Manette, with a cold and weary face.

The sergeant of police said something in Stratharden’s ear that he answered aloud:

“It has nothing to do with me,” he said. “As for the girl, she is here.”

“Nothing to do with you! And they find in your house her boxes that you took from the station—her pin that I gave her the mate of not a week ago. And they find also that paper in your handwriting in Ah Lee’s house. Everything down in white and black, lest he should forget.”

“Aunt Manette,” said Lovell sharply. “Let it be. She’s here; she knows.”

“And Ninon is in her grave,” she answered slowly. “Can I forgive that? And I sightless, till I must pass her child in the street. I will tell all! all!”

Stratharden looked at her. He knew her well; knew Keith, knew Dolly; and not one of them would hold their hand.

“I don’t think,” he said softly, “that you can bring anything so far-fetched home to me. But you can try.”

As Keith said, he was a heathen, but he was the only soul on earth who loved Stratharden.

The man knelt by him, dull eyed. He slipped his hand inside the Chinaman’s coat and felt his heart.

“He would have been wiser to die,” he said, stepping back. He brushed his hand across his mouth and swallowed.

Buff Ogilvie, who would be Lovell no more, looked [Pg 249]round him. Magdalen did not believe that his father’s work was not his, and she was not his Dark Magdalen any longer, but Countess of Barnysdale. He could ask no favors of a girl who shrank from him, who must presently be a witness against his father in the dock. He turned, and he was dizzy, to go and hide his head he knew not where. And a dull crash stopped him.

Charles Ogilvie, Viscount Stratharden, had fallen forward on his face. Ah Lee had served him well, even to carrying that in his pocket that brought death very quickly. But his own son shrank from the look on Stratharden’s dead face.

Late that night Buff Ogilvie sat in his bare room in Hare’s Rents. There was nowhere else to go, and there would be an inquest, a routing out of old things that he, his father’s son, must hear in silence. He thought of Churchill, whose eyes he had not stayed to close—of things that had been heaven yesterday and to-day were a fire that is not quenched. “The sins of the father” was an old story, read in the Bible; on living shoulders it was a different thing. An old rhyme of his house came to his mind, as such things do, and he writhed in his chair. Yet it was simple enough; it was carved in the wall over the door of that chapel he had never been let enter; he had wondered over it all his boyhood, but he cursed himself that it came home to him now.

That was it. He had made his soul a chapel to Magdalen, and Stratharden had razed it to the ground. His head dropped on his folded arms. For very shame he [Pg 250]could never so much as see her again—after his father’s sins lay between them.

Some one pushed the door ajar and stood there; saw the desolate poverty of the room, the broken man in the chair.

“Dick,” said Magdalen Clyde—and Aunt Manette slipped away in the darkness of the hall—“Dick, they’ve told me!”

The man’s hard face quivered, but he never lifted it. He shivered to the bone as she put her hand on his shoulder.

“I heard you that day in the street,” she said simply. “I thought you knew. I thought Ah Lee——Dick, speak to me!”

“I’m his son—Stratharden’s son,” he said slowly. “And you’re——”

She had slipped to her knees beside him, her hands were round his neck, her lips at his ear.

Long after a couple, a man and a woman, looked at them as they went through a room together.

“Wasn’t there some story?” the woman asked. The man she spoke to answered carelessly:

“Something about a Chinaman. She offended him and he tried to kill her. He died in prison, I think.”

For Ah Lee, heathen and murderer, had been faithful to the dead. The boxes, the pin, the whole story, he took on his shoulders; and Stratharden’s son would have been glad to have believed him.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

This novel was previously serialized in Street & Smith’s New York Weekly from August 18 to December 1, 1900. This book version has only 34 chapters, though the original serialization had 37. This is because some chapters from the earlier version have been combined or omitted. The thought break in chapter VIII was originally the start of a separate chapter. The original chapters X-XI (the entire installment from September 8, 1900) are omitted from this version.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained from the original.

Table of contents has been added and placed into the public domain by the transcriber.

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99	—	Audrey’s Recompense	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
111	—	Faithful Shirley	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
122	—	Grazia’s Mistake	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
133	—	Max	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
144	—	Dorothy’s Jewels	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
155	—	Nameless Dell	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
166	—	The Masked Bridal	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
177	—	A True Aristocrat	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
188	—	Dorothy Arnold’s Escape	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
199	—	Geoffrey’s Victory	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
210	—	Wild Oats	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
219	—	Lost, A Pearle	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
222	—	The Lily of Mordaunt	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
233	—	Nora	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
244	—	A Hoiden’s Conquest	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
255	—	The Little Marplot	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
266	—	The Welfleet Mystery	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
277	—	Brownie’s Triumph	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
282	—	The Forsaken Bride	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
288	—	Sibyl’s Influence	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
291	—	A Mysterious Wedding Ring	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
299	—	Little Miss Whirlwind	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
311	—	Wedded by Fate	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
339	—	His Heart’s Queen	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
351	—	The Churchyard Betrothal	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
362	—	Stella Rosevelt	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
372	—	A Girl in a Thousand	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
373	—	A Thorn Among Roses	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
Sequel to “A Girl in a Thousand”
382	—	Mona	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
391	—	Marguerite’s Heritage	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
399	—	Betsey’s Transformation	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
407	—	Esther, the Fright	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
415	—	Trixy	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
419	—	The Other Woman	By Charles Garvice
433	—	Winifred’s Sacrifice	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
440	—	Edna’s Secret Marriage	By Charles Garvice
451	—	Helen’s Victory	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
458	—	When Love Meets Love	By Charles Garvice
476	—	Earle Wayne’s Nobility	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
511	—	The Golden Key	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
512	—	A Heritage of Love	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
Sequel to “The Golden Key”
519	—	The Magic Cameo	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
520	—	The Heatherford Fortune	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
Sequel to “The Magic Cameo”
531	—	Better Than Life	By Charles Garvice
537	—	A Life’s Mistake	By Charles Garvice
542	—	Once in a Life	By Charles Garvice
548	—	’Twas Love’s Fault	By Charles Garvice
553	—	Queen Kate	By Charles Garvice
554	—	Step by Step	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
555	—	Put to the Test	By Ida Reade Allen
556	—	With Love’s Aid	By Wenona Gilman
557	—	In Cupid’s Chains	By Charles Garvice
558	—	A Plunge Into the Unknown	By Richard Marsh
559	—	The Love That Was Cursed	By Geraldine Fleming
560	—	The Thorns of Regret	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
561	—	The Outcast of the Family	By Charles Garvice
562	—	A Forced Promise	By Ida Reade Allen
563	—	The Old Homestead	By Denman Thompson
564	—	Love’s First Kiss	By Emma Garrison Jones
565	—	Just a Girl	By Charles Garvice
566	—	In Love’s Springtime	By Laura Jean Libbey
567	—	Trixie’s Honor	By Geraldine Fleming
568	—	Hearts and Dollars	By Ida Reade Allen
569	—	By Devious Ways	By Charles Garvice
570	—	Her Heart’s Unbidden Guest	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
571	—	Two Wild Girls	By Mrs. Charlotte May Kingsley
572	—	Amid Scarlet Roses	By Emma Garrison Jones
573	—	Heart for Heart	By Charles Garvice
574	—	The Fugitive Bride	By Mary E. Bryan
575	—	A Blue Grass Heroine	By Ida Reade Allen
576	—	The Yellow Face	By Fred M. White
577	—	The Story of a Passion	By Charles Garvice
579	—	The Curse of Beauty	By Geraldine Fleming
580	—	The Great Awakening	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
581	—	A Modern Juliet	By Charles Garvice
582	—	Virgie Talcott’s Mission	By Lucy M. Russell
583	—	His Greatest Sacrifice; or, Manch	By Mary E. Bryan
584	—	Mabel’s Fate	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
585	—	The Ape and the Diamond	By Richard Marsh
586	—	Nell, of Shorne Mills	By Charles Garvice
587	—	Katherine’s Two Suitors	By Geraldine Fleming
588	—	The Crime of Love	By Barbara Howard
589	—	His Father’s Crime	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
590	—	What Was She to Him?	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
591	—	A Heritage of Hate	By Charles Garvice
592	—	Ida Chaloner’s Heart	By Lucy Randall Comfort
593	—	Love Will Find the Way	By Wenona Gilman
594	—	A Case of Identity	By Richard Marsh
595	—	The Shadow of Her Life	By Charles Garvice
596	—	Slighted Love	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
597	—	Her Fatal Gift	By Geraldine Fleming
598	—	His Wife’s Friend	By Mary E. Bryan
599	—	At Love’s Cost	By Charles Garvice
600	—	St. Elmo	By Augusta J. Evans
601	—	The Fate of the Plotter	By Louis Tracy
602	—	Married in Error	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
603	—	Love and Jealousy	By Lucy Randall Comfort
604	—	Only a Working Girl	By Geraldine Fleming
605	—	Love, the Tyrant	By Charles Garvice
606	—	Mabel’s Sacrifice	By Charlotte M. Stanley
608	—	Love is Love Forevermore	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
609	—	John Elliott’s Flirtation	By Lucy May Russell
610	—	With All Her Heart	By Charles Garvice
611	—	Is Love Worth While?	By Geraldine Fleming
612	—	Her Husband’s Other Wife	By Emma Garrison Jones
613	—	Philip Bennion’s Death	By Richard Marsh
614	—	Little Phillis’ Lover	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
615	—	Maida	By Charles Garvice
617	—	As a Man Lives	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
618	—	The Tide of Fate	By Wenona Gilman
619	—	The Cardinal Moth	By Fred M. White
620	—	Marcia Drayton	By Charles Garvice
621	—	Lynette’s Wedding	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
622	—	His Madcap Sweetheart	By Emma Garrison Jones
623	—	Love at the Loom	By Geraldine Fleming
624	—	A Bachelor Girl	By Lucy May Russell
625	—	Kyra’s Fate	By Charles Garvice
626	—	The Joss	By Richard Marsh
627	—	My Little Love	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
628	—	A Daughter of the Marionis	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
629	—	The Lady of Beaufort Park	By Wenona Gilman
630	—	The Verdict of the Heart	By Charles Garvice
631	—	A Love Concealed	By Emma Garrison Jones
633	—	The Strange Disappearance of Lady Delia	By Louis Tracy
634	—	Love’s Golden Spell	By Geraldine Fleming
635	—	A Coronet of Shame	By Charles Garvice
636	—	Sinned Against	By Mary E. Bryan
637	—	If It Were True!	By Wenona Gilman
638	—	A Golden Barrier	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
639	—	A Hateful Bondage	By Barbara Howard
640	—	A Girl of Spirit	By Charles Garvice
641	—	Master of Men	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
642	—	A Fair Enchantress	By Ida Reade Allen
643	—	The Power of Love	By Geraldine Fleming
644	—	No Time for Penitence	By Wenona Gilman
645	—	A Jest of Fate	By Charles Garvice
646	—	Her Sister’s Secret	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
647	—	Bitterly Atoned	By Mrs. E. Burke Collins
648	—	Gertrude Elliott’s Crucible	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
649	—	The Corner House	By Fred M. White
650	—	Diana’s Destiny	By Charles Garvice
651	—	Love’s Clouded Dawn	By Wenona Gilman
652	—	Little Vixen	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
653	—	Her Heart’s Challenge	By Barbara Howard
654	—	Vivian’s Love Story	By Mrs. E. Burke Collins
655	—	Linked by Fate	By Charles Garvice
656	—	Hearts of Stone	By Geraldine Fleming
657	—	In the Service of Love	By Richard Marsh
658	—	Love’s Devious Course	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
659	—	Told in the Twilight	By Ida Reade Allen
660	—	The Mills of the Gods	By Wenona Gilman
661	—	The Man of the Hour	By Sir William Magnay
662	—	A Little Barbarian	By Charlotte Kingsley
663	—	Creatures of Destiny	By Charles Garvice
664	—	A Southern Princess	By Emma Garrison Jones
666	—	A Fateful Promise	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
667	—	The Goddess—A Demon	By Richard Marsh
668	—	From Tears to Smiles	By Ida Reade Allen
670	—	Better Than Riches	By Wenona Gilman
671	—	When Love Is Young	By Charles Garvice
672	—	Craven Fortune	By Fred M. White
673	—	Her Life’s Burden	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
674	—	The Heart of Hetta	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
675	—	The Breath of Slander	By Ida Reade Allen
676	—	My Lady Beth	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
677	—	The Wooing of Esther Gray	By Louis Tracy
678	—	The Shadow Between Them	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
679	—	Gold in the Gutter	By Charles Garvice
680	—	Master of Her Fate	By Geraldine Fleming
681	—	In Full Cry	By Richard Marsh
682	—	My Pretty Maid	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
683	—	An Unhappy Bargain	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
684	—	Her Enduring Love	By Ida Reade Allen
685	—	India’s Punishment	By Laura Jean Libbey
686	—	The Castle of the Shadows	By Mrs. C. N. Williamson
687	—	My Own Sweetheart	By Wenona Gilman
688	—	Only a Kiss	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
689	—	Lola Dunbar’s Crime	By Barbara Howard
690	—	Ruth, the Outcast	By Mrs. Mary E. Bryan
691	—	Her Dearest Love	By Geraldine Fleming
692	—	The Man of Millions	By Ida Reade Allen
693	—	For Another’s Fault	By Charlotte M. Stanley
694	—	The Belle of Saratoga	By Lucy Randall Comfort
695	—	The Mystery of the Unicorn	By Sir William Magnay
696	—	The Bride’s Opals	By Emma Garrison Jones
697	—	One of Life’s Roses	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
698	—	The Battle of Hearts	By Geraldine Fleming
700	—	In Wolf’s Clothing	By Charles Garvice
701	—	A Lost Sweetheart	By Ida Reade Allen
702	—	The Stronger Passion	By Mrs. Lillian R. Drayton
703	—	Mr. Marx’s Secret	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
704	—	Had She Loved Him Less!	By Laura Jean Libbey
705	—	The Adventure of Princess Sylvia	By Mrs. C. N. Williamson
706	—	In Love’s Paradise	By Charlotte M. Stanley
707	—	At Another’s Bidding	By Ida Reade Allen
708	—	Sold for Gold	By Geraldine Fleming
710	—	Ridgeway of Montana	By William MacLeod Raine
711	—	Taken by Storm	By Emma Garrison Jones
712	—	Love and a Lie	By Charles Garvice
713	—	Barriers of Stone	By Wenona Gilman
714	—	Ethel’s Secret	By Charlotte M. Stanley
715	—	Amber, the Adopted	By Mrs. Harriet Lewis
716	—	No Man’s Wife	By Ida Reade Allen
717	—	Wild and Willful	By Lucy Randall Comfort
718	—	When We Two Parted	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
719	—	Love’s Earnest Prayer	By Geraldine Fleming
720	—	The Price of a Kiss	By Laura Jean Libbey
721	—	A Girl from the South	By Charles Garvice
722	—	A Freak of Fate	By Emma Garrison Jones
723	—	A Golden Sorrow	By Charlotte M. Stanley
724	—	Norna’s Black Fortune	By Ida Reade Alien
725	—	The Thoroughbred	By Edith MacVane
726	—	Diana’s Peril	By Dorothy Hall
727	—	His Willing Slave	By Lillian R. Drayton
728	—	Her Share of Sorrow	By Wenona Gilman
729	—	Loved at Last	By Geraldine Fleming
730	—	John Hungerford’s Redemption	By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
731	—	His Two Loves	By Ida Reade Allen
732	—	Eric Braddon’s Love	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
733	—	Garrison’s Finish	By W. B. M. Ferguson
734	—	Sylvia, the Forsaken	By Charlotte M. Stanley
735	—	Married for Money	By Lucy Randall Comfort
736	—	Married in Haste	By Wenona Gilman
737	—	At Her Father’s Bidding	By Geraldine Fleming
738	—	The Power of Gold	By Ida Reade Allen
739	—	The Strength of Love	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
740	—	A Soul Laid Bare	By J. K. Egerton
741	—	The Fatal Ruby	By Charles Garvice
742	—	A Strange Wooing	By Richard Marsh
743	—	A Lost Love	By Wenona Gilman
744	—	A Useless Sacrifice	By Emma Garrison Jones
745	—	A Will of Her Own	By Ida Reade Allen
746	—	That Girl Named Haze	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
747	—	For a Flirt’s Love	By Geraldine Fleming
748	—	The World’s Great Snare	By E. Phillips Oppenheim
749	—	The Heart of a Maid	By Charles Garvice
750	—	Driven from Home	By Wenona Gilman
751	—	The Gypsy’s Warning	By Emma Garrison Jones
752	—	Without Name or Wealth	By Ida Reade Allen
753	—	Loyal Unto Death	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
754	—	His Lost Heritage	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
755	—	Her Priceless Love	By Geraldine Fleming
756	—	Leola’s Heart	By Charlotte M. Stanley
757	—	Dare-devil Betty	By Evelyn Malcolm
758	—	The Woman in It	By Charles Garvice
759	—	They Met by Chance	By Ida Reade Allen
760	—	Love Conquers Pride	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
761	—	A Reckless Promise	By Emma Garrison Jones
762	—	The Rose of Yesterday	By Effie Adelaide Rowlands
763	—	The Other Girl’s Lover	By Lillian R. Drayton
764	—	His Unbounded Faith	By Charlotte M. Stanley
765	—	When Love Speaks	By Evelyn Malcolm
766	—	The Man She Hated	By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
767	—	No One to Help Her	By Ida Reade Allen
768	—	Claire’s Love-Life	By Lucy Randall Comfort
769	—	Love’s Harvest	By Adelaide Fox Robinson
770	—	A Queen of Song	By Geraldine Fleming
771	—	Nan Haggard’s Confession	By Mary E. Bryan
772	—	A Married Flirt	By Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
773	—	The Thorns of Love	By Evelyn Malcolm
774	—	Love in a Snare	By Charles Garvice
775	—	My Love Kitty	By Charles Garvice
776	—	That Strange Girl	By Charles Garvice
777	—	Nellie	By Charles Garvice
778	—	Miss Estcourt; or, Olive	By Charles Garvice
779	—	A Virginia Goddess	By Ida Reade Allen
780	—	The Love He Sought	By Lillian R. Drayton
781	—	Falsely Accused	By Geraldine Fleming
782	—	His First Sweetheart	By Lucy Randall Comfort
783	—	All for Love	By Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

The Project Gutenberg eBook of When love dawns

WHEN LOVE DAWNS

Copyright Fiction by the Best Authors NEW EAGLE SERIES

WHEN LOVE DAWNS

THE BEST OF EVERYTHING!

BOOKS FOR MEN.

BOOKS FOR WOMEN.

BOOKS FOR BOYS.

Why Take a Chance?

WHEN LOVE DAWNS.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. PROFITS OF A PAST.

CHAPTER II. WHEN THE PRESENT’S QUESTIONABLE.

CHAPTER III. EYES THAT LOOKED INTO EYES.

CHAPTER IV. AN OUTCAST.

CHAPTER V. “I NEVER KNEW HIM.”

CHAPTER VI. A GOLDEN FUTURE.

CHAPTER VII. ACROSS CLYDE WATER.

CHAPTER VIII. MAGDALEN DREAMS.

CHAPTER IX. DOLLY’S PREDICAMENT.

CHAPTER X. BETWEEN TWO EVILS.

CHAPTER XI. THE EYES BEHIND THE GLASS.

CHAPTER XII. IN THE CHAPEL.

CHAPTER XIII. STRATHARDEN “SEES THEM OFF.”

CHAPTER XIV. “MURDER!”

CHAPTER XV. DOLLY SEES DAYLIGHT.

CHAPTER XVI. “DARK MAGDALEN.”

CHAPTER XVII. FOR THE HOUSE OF BARNYSDALE.

CHAPTER XVIII. EYES TO THE BLIND.

CHAPTER XIX. “GOOD LORD, DELIVER US!”

CHAPTER XX. DOLLY TAKES FEAR BY THE THROAT.

CHAPTER XXI. IN DISGUISE.

CHAPTER XXII. WHEN LOVE DAWNS.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE NAKED FOOTSTEP.

CHAPTER XXIV. AT AUNT MANETTE’S.

CHAPTER XXV. “BUFF OGILVIE!”

CHAPTER XXVI. A CURTAIN AND A SHADOW.

CHAPTER XXVII. “WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU?”

CHAPTER XXVIII. ONLY A BIT OF GOLD FILIGREE.

CHAPTER XXIX. THE GREEN BAIZE DOOR.

CHAPTER XXX. LORD STRATHARDEN BEGINS.

CHAPTER XXXI. THE BLIND GUIDE.

CHAPTER XXXII. IN THE HOUSE OF AH LEE.

CHAPTER XXXIII. IN THE HOUSE OF HER DREAM.

CHAPTER XXXIV. ONE THAT WAS LOST.

S. & S. Novels

Transcriber’s Notes:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

Copyright Fiction by the Best Authors
NEW EAGLE SERIES

CHAPTER I.
PROFITS OF A PAST.

CHAPTER II.
WHEN THE PRESENT’S QUESTIONABLE.

CHAPTER III.
EYES THAT LOOKED INTO EYES.

CHAPTER IV.
AN OUTCAST.

CHAPTER V.
“I NEVER KNEW HIM.”

CHAPTER VI.
A GOLDEN FUTURE.

CHAPTER VII.
ACROSS CLYDE WATER.

CHAPTER VIII.
MAGDALEN DREAMS.

CHAPTER IX.
DOLLY’S PREDICAMENT.

CHAPTER X.
BETWEEN TWO EVILS.

CHAPTER XI.
THE EYES BEHIND THE GLASS.

CHAPTER XII.
IN THE CHAPEL.

CHAPTER XIII.
STRATHARDEN “SEES THEM OFF.”

CHAPTER XIV.
“MURDER!”

CHAPTER XV.
DOLLY SEES DAYLIGHT.

CHAPTER XVI.
“DARK MAGDALEN.”

CHAPTER XVII.
FOR THE HOUSE OF BARNYSDALE.

CHAPTER XVIII.
EYES TO THE BLIND.

CHAPTER XIX.
“GOOD LORD, DELIVER US!”

CHAPTER XX.
DOLLY TAKES FEAR BY THE THROAT.

CHAPTER XXI.
IN DISGUISE.

CHAPTER XXII.
WHEN LOVE DAWNS.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THE NAKED FOOTSTEP.

CHAPTER XXIV.
AT AUNT MANETTE’S.

CHAPTER XXV.
“BUFF OGILVIE!”

CHAPTER XXVI.
A CURTAIN AND A SHADOW.

CHAPTER XXVII.
“WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU?”

CHAPTER XXVIII.
ONLY A BIT OF GOLD FILIGREE.

CHAPTER XXIX.
THE GREEN BAIZE DOOR.

CHAPTER XXX.
LORD STRATHARDEN BEGINS.

CHAPTER XXXI.
THE BLIND GUIDE.

CHAPTER XXXII.
IN THE HOUSE OF AH LEE.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
IN THE HOUSE OF HER DREAM.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
ONE THAT WAS LOST.