"

"Paris was flooded by rich young men from the United States who came
over to fight the Boche and to spend their money like water when on
leave in Paris. Frank was only one of them."

Benton was silent. The affair was a distinctly unsavoury one. Frank van
Geen, the son of the Dutch-American millionaire cocoa manufacturer of
Chicago, had, by reason of his association with Molly, found himself the
poorer by nearly a quarter of a million francs, and his body had been
found in the Seine between the Pont d'Auteuil and the Ile St. Germain.
At the inquiry some ugly disclosures were made, but already the lady
of the Rue Racine and her supposed niece had left Paris; and though
the affair was one of suicide, the police raised a hue and cry, and the
frontiers had been watched, but the pair had disappeared.

That was several months ago. And now Molly Maxwell the adventuress in
Paris had been transformed into the wealthy and highly respectable widow
Mrs. Bond, who having presented such excellent references had become
tenant of that well-furnished mansion, Shapley Manor, and the beautiful
grounds adjoining. For nearly two centuries it had been the home of the
Puttenhams, but Sir George Puttenham, Baronet, the present owner, had
found himself ruined by war-taxation, and as one of the new poor he had
been glad to let the place and live upon the rent obtained for it. His
case, indeed, was only one of thousands of others in England, where
adventurers and war-profiteers were ousting the landed gentry.

"Yvonne is evidently keeping a good watch upon young Hugh," remarked
Benton presently, as he blew a ring of cigarette smoke towards the
ceiling.

"Yes," replied the woman, her eyes fixed out of the big window which
commanded a glorious view of Gibbet Hill, at Hindhead, and the blue
South Downs towards the English Channel. But all was dark and lowering
in the winter twilight, now fast darkening into night.

In old-world Guildford, the county town of Surrey, with its steep High
Street containing many seventeenth-century houses, its old inns, and its
balconied Guildhall--the scene of so many unseemly wrangles among the
robed and cocked-hatted borough councillors who are, _par excellence_,
outstanding illustrations of the provincial petty jealousies of
bumbledom--Mrs. Bond was welcomed by the trades-people who vied with
each other to "serve her." Almost daily she went up and down the High
Street in her fine Rolls-Royce driven by Mead, a