g which both had seemed lost in their thoughts.

"Who knows?--But I will write and tell you what my uncle says about the
letters, if he says anything. Again, thank you!"

She gave her hand frankly. Piers held it, and looked into her face as
once before.

"Olga----"

The girl uttered a cry of distress, drew her hand away, and exclaimed
in a half-hysterical voice:

"No! What right have you?"

"Every right! Do you know what your mother said to me--her last words
to me----?"

"You mustn't tell me!" Her tones were softer. "Not to-day. If we meet
again----"

"Of course we shall meet again!"

"I don't know. Yes, yes; we shall. But you must go now; it is time I
went home."

He touched her hand again, and left the room without looking back.
Before the door had closed behind him, Olga ran forward with a stifled
cry. The door was shut. She stood before it with tears in her eyes, her
fingers clenched together on her breast, and sobbed miserably.

For nearly half an hour she sat by the fire, head on hands, deeply
brooding. In the house there was not a sound. All at once it seemed to
her that a voice called, uttering her name; she started, her blood
chilled with fear. The voice was her mother's; she seemed still to hear
it, so plainly had it been audible, coming from she knew not where.

She ran to her hat and jacket, which lay in a corner of the room, put
them on with feverish haste, and fled out into the street.

CHAPTER XXIX

"I will be frank with you, Piers," said Daniel Otway, as he sat by the
fireside in his shabby lodgings, his feet on the fender, a cigarette
between his fingers. He looked yellow and dried up; shivered now and
then, and had a troublesome cough. "If I could afford to be generous, I
would be; I should enjoy it. It's one of the worst evils of poverty,
that a man can seldom obey the promptings of his better self. I can't
give you these letters; can't afford to do so. You have glanced through
them; you see they really are what I said. The question is, what are
they worth to you?"

Piers looked at the threadbare carpet, reflected, spoke.

"I'll give you fifty pounds."

A smile crept from the corners of Daniel's shrivelled lips to his
bloodshot eye.

"Why are you so anxious to have them," he said, "I don't know and don't
ask. But if they are worth fifty to you, they are worth more. You shall
have them for two hundred."

And at this figure the bundle of letters eventually changed hands.