hone, rang up Walter Brock,
and told him the reassuring news.

"In Malines?" he cried over the wire. "I wonder if I dare go there to
see him? What a dead-alive hole!"

Not until then did Dorise recollect that the girl had not given her
Hugh's address. She had, perhaps, purposely withheld it.

This fact she told Hugh's friend, who replied over the wire:

"Well, it is highly satisfactory news, in any case. We can only wait,
Miss Ranscomb. But this must relieve your mind, I feel sure."

"Yes, it does," admitted Dorise, and a few moments later she rang off.

That evening Il Passero's _chic_ messenger crossed from Dover to Ostend,
and next morning she called at Madame Maupoil's, in Malines, where she
delivered Dorise's note into Hugh's own hand. She was an expert and
hardened traveller.

Hugh eagerly devoured its contents, for it was the first communication
he had had from her since that fateful night at Monte Carlo. Then,
having thanked the girl again, and again, the latter said:

"If you wish to write back to Miss Ranscomb do so. I will address the
envelope, and as I am going to Cologne to-night I will post it on my
arrival."

Hugh thanked her cordially, and while she sat chatting with Madame
Maupoil, sipping her _cafe au lait_, he sat down and wrote a long letter
to the girl he loved so deeply--a letter which reached its destination
four days later.

One morning about ten days afterwards, when the sun shone brightly upon
the fresh green of the Surrey hills, Mrs. Bond was sitting before a fire
in the pretty morning room at Shapley Manor, a room filled with antique
furniture and old blue china, reading an illustrated paper. At the long,
leaded window stood a tall, fair-faced girl in a smart navy-suit. She
was decidedly pretty, with large, soft grey eyes, dimpled cheeks, and a
small, well-formed mouth. She gazed abstractedly out of the window
over the beautiful panorama to where Hindhead rose abruptly in the blue
distance. The view from the moss-grown terrace at Shapley, high upon
the Hog's back, was surely one of the finest within a couple of hundred
miles of London.

Since Mrs. Bond's arrival there she had had many callers among the
_nouveau riche_, those persons who, having made money at the expense of
our gallant British soldiers, have now ousted half the county families
from their solid and responsible homes. Mrs. Bond, being wealthy, had
displayed her riches ostentatiously. She had subscribed lavishly to