before Marston could arrive Daphne slipped away. "I shall
wait up for Jack," she said to her mother. "Send him, _the instant he
comes_, to me in my sitting-room."

One by one the ladies of the party followed Daphne's example. The men
went off into the smoking-room. Mrs Mavor and I were left alone. Her
nervousness and excitement, suppressed hitherto, were now at fever
heat. She moved about the room, pushing chairs into fresh positions,
shaking their cushions, taking up and setting down, now this now that
ornament, with trembling fingers pulling out and pushing in flowers in
the vases, not improving their arrangement by any means.

"The question is what Hughie will do," she said for the twentieth time.
"If only he would leave it alone! If he would not interfere! It has
gone so far, only Heaven should intervene. You know, Hannah, we all
marry men with our eyes blinded. Daphne must take her chance like the
rest. Supposing it was you, Hannah; if the man was a--murderer--and you
loved him, and knew that he madly loved you, would you thank anyone for
coming between? You'd marry him, wouldn't you?"

I declined to say how I should proceed with my murderer. If I had it in
me to love a man against my reason and my conscience I could not tell.

"It's eleven o'clock," I said. "I thought you told me he would be here
by half-past ten."

She ceased to fidget with the furniture, and came to the mantelpiece by
which I was standing.

"The clock's wrong," she said. "Fast, a good half-hour." She seized the
little gold carriage clock and shook it in her nervous fingers as if
that would put the matter right. The door opened.

"Here he is!" she said, and started violently, almost dropping the
clock.

It was Hugh who came in, his face pale, a fire of excitement gleaming
in his eyes, his watch in his hand. "He should have been here half an
hour ago. It is as I told you: he has made a bolt," he said.

"The dog-cart is not back?"

"No; but you'll see!"

"Are the men gone to bed, Hugh?"

"No, they're in there"; he gave a backward toss of his head in the
direction of the smoking-room. "It all makes me sick," he said. "I
can't sit there and hee-haw with them."

He took up his position between his mother and me, his hands on the
mantelpiece, his foot on the fender, and gloomed down upon the hearth.

When the hands of the little clock showed that another half-hour had
flown, the door was flung open and Daphne came in.

"Hasn't he co