man knocked loudly at the door,
which was opened by the doctor himself. Briefly and rapidly Sir Norman
informed him how and where his services were required; and the doctor
being always provided with everything necessary for such cases, set out
with him immediately. Fifteen minutes after leaving his own house, Sir
Norman was back there again, and standing in his own chamber. But a
simultaneous exclamation of amazement and consternation broke from him
and Ormiston, as on entering the room they found the bed empty, and the
lady gone!

A dead pause followed, during which the three looked blankly at the bed,
and then at each other. The scene, no doubt, would have been ludicrous
enough to a third party; but neither of our trio could saw anything
whatever to laugh at. Ormiston was the first to speak.

"What in Heaven's name has happened!" he wonderingly exclaimed.

"Some one has been here," said Sir Norman, turning very pale, "and
carried her off while we were gone."

"Let us search the house," said the doctor; "you should have locked your
door, Sir Norman; but it may not be too late yet."

Acting on the hint, Sir Norman seized the lamp burning on the table, and
started on the search. His two friends followed him, and

"The highest, the lowest, the loveliest spot,
They searched for the lady, and found her not."

No, though there was not the slightest trace of robbers or intruders,
neither was there the slightest trace of the beautiful plague-patient.
Everything in the house was precisely as it always was, but the silver
shining vision was gone.

CHAPTER III. THE COURT PAGE

The search was given over at last in despair, and the doctor took his
hat and disappeared. Sir Norman and Ormiston stopped in the lower hall
and looked at each other in mute amaze.

"What can it all mean?" asked Ormiston, appealing more to society at
large than to his bewildered companion.

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Sir Norman, distractedly; "only I am
pretty certain, if I don't find her, I shall do something so desperate
that the plague will be a trifle compared to it!"

"It seems almost impossible that she can have been carried off--doesn't
it?"

"If she has!" exclaimed Sir Norman, "and I find out the abductor, he
won't have a whole bone in his body two minutes after!"

"And yet more impossible that she can have gone off herself," pursued
Ormiston with the air of one entering upon an abstruse subject, a