nner
of a lady--in league (as Geoffrey had declared) with the illiterate
vagabond who was attempting to extort money anonymously from Mrs.
Glenarm? Impossible! Making every allowance for the proverbial
deceitfulness of appearances, impossible!

"Your name has been mentioned to me," said Julius, answering her after
a momentary pause. His instincts, as a gentleman, made him shrink from
referring to the association of her name with the name of his brother.
"My father mentioned you," he added, considerately explaining his
knowledge of her in _that_ way, "when I last saw him in London."

"Your father!" She came a step nearer, with a look of distrust as
well as a look of astonishment in her face. "Your father is Lord
Holchester--is he not?"

"Yes."

"What made him speak of _me?_"

"He was ill at the time," Julius answered. "And he had been thinking of
events in his past life with which I am entirely unacquainted. He said
he had known your father and mother. He desired me, if you were ever in
want of any assistance, to place my services at your disposal. When he
expressed that wish, he spoke very earnestly--he gave me the impression
that there was a feeling of regret associated with the recollections on
which he had been dwelling."

Slowly, and in silence, Anne drew back to the low wall of the terrace
close by. She rested one hand on it to support herself. Julius had said
words of terrible import without a suspicion of what he had done. Never
until now had Anne Silvester known that the man who had betrayed her was
the son of that other man whose discovery of the flaw in the marriage
had ended in the betrayal of her mother before her. She felt the shock
of the revelation with a chill of superstitious dread. Was the chain of
a fatality wound invisibly round her? Turn which way she might was she
still going darkly on, in the track of her dead mother, to an appointed
and hereditary doom? Present things passed from her view as the awful
doubt cast its shadow over her mind. She lived again for a moment in
the time when she was a child. She saw the face of her mother once more,
with the wan despair on it of the bygone days when the title of wife was
denied her, and the social prospect was closed forever.

Julius approached, and roused her.

"Can I get you any thing?" he asked. "You are looking very ill. I hope I
have said nothing to distress you?"

The question failed to attract her attention. She put a question herself
i