r friend," she remarked, quietly, "is almost
allegorical. He has gone into the land of ghosts--or are we the ghosts,
I wonder, who loiter here?"

Mannering answered her without a touch of levity. He, too, was unusually
serious.

"We have the better part," he said. "Yet Borrowdean is one of those men
who know very well how to play upon the heartstrings. A human being is
like a musical instrument to him. He knows how to find out the harmonies
or strike the discords."

She turned away.

"I am superstitious," she murmured, with a little shiver. "I suppose that
it is this ghostly mist, and the silence which has come with it. Yet I
wish that your friend had stayed away from Blakely!"

* * * * *

Upstairs from her window Clara also was gazing along the road where
Borrowdean had disappeared. And Borrowdean himself was puzzling over a
third telegram which Mannering had carelessly passed on to him with his
own, and which, although it was clearly addressed to Mannering, he had,
after a few minutes' hesitation, opened. It had been handed in at the
Strand Post-office.

"I must see you this week.--Blanche."

A few hours later, on his arrival in London, Borrowdean repeated this
message to Mannering from the same post-office, and quietly tearing up
the original went down to the House.

"I cannot tell," he reported to his chief, "whether we have succeeded or
not. In a fortnight or less we shall know."

CHAPTER IV

THE DUCHESS ASKS A QUESTION

Clara stepped through the high French window, and with skirts a little
raised crossed the lawn. Lindsay, who was following her, stopped to
light a cigarette.

"We're getting frightfully modern," she remarked, turning and waiting for
him. "Mrs. Handsell and I ought to have come out here, and you and uncle
ought to have stayed and yawned at one another over the dinner-table."

"You have an excellent preceptress--in modernity," he remarked. "May I?"

"If you mean smoke, of course you may," she answered. "But you may not
say or think horrid things about my best friend. She's a dear, wonderful
woman, and I'm sure uncle has not been like the same man since she came."

"I'm glad you appreciate that," he answered. "Do you honestly think he's
any the better for it?"

"I think he's immensely improved," she answered. "He doesn't grub about
by himself nearly so much, and he's had his hair cut. I'm sure he looks
years younger."

"Do you think that