aid--we really know
nothing about her--it would be such a temptation. Would you
mind----"

"Is this----" Rainham began, and stopped short.

Lady Garnett's brilliant eyes, and a little admonitory gesture of
one hand, restrained him. When the girl had shut the door behind
her, the elder lady turned to him with a quaint smile.

"Is that it? Of course it is, my friend. You are singularly obtuse:
a woman would have seen through me at once."

"I beg your pardon," said Rainham, somewhat mystified. "You mean it
was a pretext?"

"It was for you that I made it," she replied with dignity. "What was
it you came to say?"

The other was silent for a moment, cogitating. When he looked up at
last, meeting her eyes, it was with something like a shiver, in a
tone of genuine dismay, that he remarked:

"Dear lady, there are times when you terrify me. You see too much.
It is not--no, it is not human. I had meant to tell you nothing."

He stopped short, lowering his voice, and looking from the depths of
his low chair into the red fire.

"It is not necessary, Philip," she continued presently, "that you
should tell me; only, if you will be so secret, you should wear
smoked glasses. Your eyes were so speaking that I was afraid--yes,
afraid--when you came into the room. They looked haunted; they had
the air of having seen a ghost!"

"It was a very respectable ghost," he said grimly, "with a
frock-coat and a bald head. You know Sir Egbert, I suppose?"

"Only by name. I imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke
of Harley Street. Does he send you South again?"

"No," said Rainham shortly; "he thinks it would be inexpedient--that
was his phrase, inexpedient--in an hotel, you know, and all that....
I was obliged to him, because in any case it would have been
inconvenient to me to be abroad this year. I suppose, though, that
if it would have done me any good I should have gone; but I have a
great deal to arrange."

He went on composedly to tell her of the most important of these
arrangements--the disposal of his business. He had systematically
neglected it for years, he explained, and it had ended by going to
the dogs. So long as his foreman was there, that had not mattered so
much; but Bullen had decided to desert him, and very wisely. He had
accepted an offer to manage the works of a firm of North-Country
shipbuilders; he was to shake the dust of Blackpool from off his
feet in a very few months, and would probably make his