ss
over its close.'"

"It doesn't, Jack."

"It will. I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you;
just 'yours very truly, Janet Cardiff.'"

She wrote as he dictated, and then read the letter slowly
over from the beginning. "It sounds very hard, dear,"
she said, lifting eyes to his which he saw were full of
tears, "and as if I didn't care."

"My darling," he said, taking her into his arms, "I hope
you don't--I hope you won't care, after to-morrow. And
now, don't you think we've had enough of Miss Elfrida
Bell for the present?"

CHAPTER XXXV.

At three o'clock, an hour before he expected the Cardiffs,
John Kendal ran up the stairs to his studio. The door
stood ajar, and with a jealous sense of his possession
within, he reproached himself for his carelessness in
leaving it so. He had placed the portrait the day before
where all the light in the room fell upon it, and his
first hasty impression of the place assured him that it
stood there still. When he looked directly at it he
instinctively shut the door, made a step or two forward,
closed his eyes and so stood for a moment, with his hands
before them. Then, with a groan, "Damnation!" he opened
them again and faced the fact. The portrait was literally
in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung
over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained
unriddled to show that it had represented anything human.
Its destruction was absolute--fiendish, it seemed to
Kendal.

He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked
in his hands.

"Damnation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never
approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still
speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."

He had not an instant's doubt of the author of the
destruction, and he remembered with a flash in connection
with it the little silver-handled Algerian dagger that
pinned one of Nadie Palicsky's studies against the wall
of Elfrida's room. It was not till a quarter of an hour
afterward that he thought it worth while to pick up the
note that lay on the table addressed to him, and then he
opened it with a nauseated sense of her unnecessary
insistence.

"I have come here this morning," Elfrida had written,
"determined to either kill myself or IT. It is impossible,
I find, notwithstanding all that I said, that both should
continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must
not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you
that I struggled