think of--made every preparation and taken every
precaution--and now there was nothing left but to wait until the
appointed hour should strike, and Alan should be a free man again.

One concession she made to Mrs. Graham's sense of propriety. There was
an old lady who had once been Clara's governess--a gentle, mild-tongued,
unobservant person, who was greatly in want of a home. Mrs. Alison was
easily induced to promise the support of her presence to Lettice during
the days or weeks which Lettice hoped to spend at Bute Lodge. She was a
woman of unimpeachable decorum and respectability, and her presence in
the house would, in Clara's opinion, prove a bulwark against all
dangers; but, although evil tongues might be silenced by the fact of her
presence, the old lady was singularly useless in the capacity of
chaperon. She was infirm, a little deaf, and very shy; but her presence
in the house was supposed to be a sop to Cerberus, in the person of Mrs.
Grundy, and Clara was less afraid for her friend than she had been
before Mrs. Alison was installed at Bute Lodge.

CHAPTER XXXV.

FROM PRISON TO PARADISE.

Punctually at ten o'clock on the 29th of October a brougham drove up to
the gates of the prison in which Alan Walcott had spent his six months
of retreat from the world; and almost immediately Alan made his
appearance, leaning on the arm of a warder.

Lettice hurried to meet him, displacing the warder with a few words of
thanks, and repressing with an effort the painful throbbing of her heart
and throat. The sight of his shrunken form and hollow eyes, as he looked
at her with pathetic and childlike trust, for a moment took away all her
strength; but when his hand was laid upon her arm, and she accommodated
her steps to his slow and unsteady movements, he found in her no trace
of the weakness she had overcome.

It was clear that he had not yet made a good recovery from his fever.
Lettice's last little qualm of doubt as to the use or need for what she
had done disappeared as she saw this wreck of the man whom she
loved--whom she believed to be innocent of offense and persecuted by an
evil fate. What might have become of him if he had been left to crawl
out of his prison into the cold and censorious world, without a friend,
a hope, or an interest in life? What lowest depth of despair might he
not have touched if in such a plight as this he should be found and
tortured anew by his old enemy, whose cruelty was evid