d curiously at her riding boot and spurred
heel as she got out under the covered way. She and Lushington had not
exchanged a word during the short drive.

He went up in the lift with her and saw her to the door of her
apartment. Then he stood still, with his hat off, holding out his hand
to say good-bye.

'No,' said Margaret, 'come in. I don't care what the people think!'

He followed her into her sitting-room, and she shut the door, and
turned up the electric light. When he saw her standing in the full
glare of the lamps, she had thrown back her hood; she wore a wig with
short tangled hair as part of her man's disguise, and her face was
heavily powdered over the paint in order to produce the ghastly pallor
which indicates a broken heart on the stage. The heavily-blackened
lashes made her eyes seem very dark, while her lips were still a deep
crimson. She held her head high, and a little thrown back, and there
was something wild and almost fantastic about her looks as she stood
there, that made Lushington think of one of Hoffmann's tales. She held
out her whitened hand to him; and when he took it he felt the chalk on
it, and it was no longer to him the hand of Margaret Donne, but the
hand of the Cordova, the great soprano.

'It's of no use,' she said. 'Something always brings us together. I
believe it's our fate. Thank you for what you've just done. Thank
you--Tom, with all my heart!'

And suddenly the voice was Margaret's, and rang true and kind. For had
he not saved her, and her career, too, perhaps? She could not but be
grateful, and forget her other triumphant self for a moment. There was
no knowing where that mad Greek might have taken her if she had gone
near the door in the corridor again; it would have been somewhere out
of Europe, to some lawless Eastern country whence she could never have
got back to civilisation again.

'You must thank my mother,' Lushington answered quietly. 'It was she
who found out the danger and told me what to do. But I'm glad you're
safe from that brute!'

He pressed the handsome, chalked hand in his own and then to his lips
when he had spoken, in a very un-English way; for, after all, he was
the son of Madame Bonanni, the French singer, and only half an
Anglo-Saxon.

* * * * *

The last thing Madame Bonanni remembered, before a strangely sweet and
delicious perfume had overpowered her senses, was that she had
congratulated herself on