om, that she thought him profoundly
asleep--that she arose from her bed to go and sit at her open window.

She had not been seated there many minutes before she became singularly
conscious, she did not know how, of some presence near her among the
bushes in the garden below. It had indeed scarcely seemed to be sound or
movement which had attracted her attention, and yet it must have been
one or both, for she involuntarily turned to a particular spot.

Yes, something, someone, was standing in a corner, hidden by shrubbery.
It was the middle of the night, and people were meeting. She sat still
and almost breathless. She could hear nothing and saw nothing but,
between the leafage, a dim gleam of white. Only Ameerah wore white.
After a few seconds' waiting she began to think a strange thing, though
she presently realised that, taking all things into consideration, it
was not strange at all. She got up very noiselessly and stole into her
husband's room. He was not there; the bed was empty, though he had slept
there earlier in the night.

She went back to her own bed and got into it again. In ten minutes' time
Captain Osborn crept upstairs and returned to bed also. Hester made no
sign and did not ask any questions. She knew he would have told her
nothing, and also she did not wish to hear. She had seen him speaking to
Ameerah in the lane a few days before, and now that he was meeting her
in the night she knew that she need not ask herself what the subject of
their consultation might be. But she looked haggard in the morning.

Lady Walderhurst herself did not look well, For the last two or three
nights she had been starting from her sleep again with that eerie
feeling of being wakened by someone at her bedside, though she had found
no one when she had examined the room on getting up.

"I am sorry to say I am afraid I am getting a little nervous," she had
said to Jane Cupp. "I will begin to take valerian, though it is really
very nasty."

Jane herself had a somewhat harried expression of countenance. She did
not mention to her mistress that for some days she had been faithfully
following a line of conduct she had begun to mark out for herself. She
had obtained a pair of list slippers and had been learning to go about
softly. She had sat up late and risen from her bed early, though she had
not been rewarded by any particularly marked discoveries. She had
thought, however, that she observed that Ameerah did not look at her a