nd ceremony of marriage. But where
were these certificates? Conceivably they had been destroyed; that was
not likely, but it was possible. At any rate, to find them would need
much time and some money. On reflection, the Major could not blame Harry
for defying him by the Pool.

It will be seen that the information which Mina had gleaned from her
mother, and filled in from her own childish recollection, was not so
minute in the matter of dates as that which Madame de Kries had given at
the time of the events to Mr Cholderton, and which was now locked away
in the drawer at Mr Jenkinson Neeld's chambers. The Major would have
been materially assisted by a sight of that document; it would have
narrowed the necessary area of inquiry and given a definiteness to his
assertions which must have carried added weight with Mr Iver. As it was,
he began to be convinced that Mina would decline to remember any dates
even approximately, and this was all she had professed to do in her
first disclosure. Duplay acknowledged that, as matters stood, the
betting was in favor of his adversary.

Mina, being sulky, would not talk to her uncle; she could not talk to
Janie Iver; she did not see Harry, and would not have dared to talk to
him if she had. But it need hardly be said that she was dying to talk to
somebody. With such matters on hand, she struggled against silence like
soda-water against the cork. Merely to stare down at Blent and wonder
what was happening there whetted a curiosity it could not satisfy. She
felt out of the game, and the feeling was intolerable. As a last resort,
in a last effort to keep in touch with it, although she had been warned
that she would find nothing of interest to her in the volume, she
telegraphed to a bookseller in London to send her Mr. Cholderton's
Journal. It came the day after it was published, four days after she had
made Mr Neeld's acquaintance, and while Lady Tristram, contrary to
expectation, still held death at arm's length and lay looking at her own
picture. The next morning Neeld received a pressing invitation to go to
tea at Merrion Lodge. Without a moment's hesitation he went; with him
too all resolutions to know and to care nothing further about the matter
vanished before the first chance of seeing more of it. And Mina had
been Mina de Kries.

She received him in the library; the Journal lay on the table. Something
had restored animation to her manner and malice to her eyes; those who
knew he