rom the office. He can make
me a new will there as well as here. Indeed, I ought not to have
postponed it for so long."

She ordered her little pony phaeton. It was nearly five o'clock. There
would be plenty of time to drive to Marleigh Abbey, where her lawyer
lived, to interview him, and get back again before it was dark. She
would make Mary's interests safe. She had come to care for the child
more than she had ever expected to care. She was going to make a
provision for her, so that she should be secure against the chances and
changes of this life. Nothing very startling, nothing that need make
Jarvis grumble to any great extent; just a modest provision which would
not keep Mary from making use of the talents with which God had endowed
her and the education her fairy godmother had given her.

It was not long before she had left the town behind, and was driving
along the winding road that ran by the foot of the mountains. The road
was very lonely.

Chloe was rather nervous, not to say hysterical, on this particular
afternoon. Her mistress had not considered her as was her wont. She had
taken the shortest road, forcing her to meet a black monster of a
steam-tram which she had sometimes seen at a distance, a thing which was
her special abomination. Chloe had made a bolt for it, and had passed
the tram safely and got away on to the back road. She had been
accustomed, when she had made her small runaways before, to be petted
and soothed afterwards. Indeed, as soon as her terror had calmed a
little, and she was on the road she knew to be harmless, she slackened
down, expecting to hear her mistress's voice of tender scolding, to have
her mistress alight and stroke her with soft words. Instead of that she
was touched up pretty sharply.

"Get me there, my girl," said Lady Anne. "Get me there quickly. You can
take your time going home, and we'll go the lower road. I feel as though
Death and I were running a race. I could never forgive myself if I died
before I'd provided for Mary."

The pony gave her head a shake as though in answer to her mistress's
words, pricked up her ears and set off at a sharp canter.

Suddenly something happened. Lady Anne had at first no realisation of
what it was. Jennings, the coachman, said afterwards that it must have
been the work of one of the mischievous lads whom he had driven with his
whip from staring in at his stable door. What happened was that the
pony's bridle, which had been snippe