ith a
poor attempt at jauntiness.

"Where have you come from,--Russia?" he demanded.

I nodded.

"H'm! So you went back, after all. I thought as much! Who's had your
copy?"

"I've sent none; I went on private business," I protested hotly. It
angered me that he should think me capable of going back on him.

"I oughtn't to have said that; I apologize," he said stiffly, still
staring at me intently. "But--what on earth have you been up to? More
prison experiences? Well, keep your own counsel, of course. I've kept it
for you,--as far as I knew it. Mrs. Cayley believes I've sent you off to
the ends of the earth; and I've been mendaciously assuring her that
you're all right,--though Miss Pendennis has had her doubts, and nearly
bowled me out, once or twice."

"Miss--_who_?" I shouted.

"Miss Pendennis, of course. Didn't you know she was staying with your
cousin again? A queer coincidence about that portrait! Hello, here we
are at Victoria. And there's Cayley!"

CHAPTER LI

THE REAL ANNE

"It's incredible!" I exclaimed.

"Well, it's true, anyhow!" Jim asserted. "And I don't see myself where
the incredibility comes in."

"You say that Mr. Pendennis wrote from Berlin not a week after I left
England, and that he and Anne--_Anne_--are at this moment staying with
you in Chelsea? When I've been constantly with her,--saw her murdered in
the streets of Warsaw!"

"That must have been the other woman,--the woman of the portrait,
whoever she may be. No one seems to know, not even Pendennis. We've
discussed it several times,--not before Anne. We don't think it wise to
remind her of that Russian episode; it upsets her too much; for she's
not at all the thing even yet, poor girl."

He seemed quite to have changed his mental attitude towards Anne, and
spoke of her as kindly as if she had been Mary's sister.

"It's another case of mistaken identity based on an extraordinary
likeness," he continued. "There have been many such,--more in fact than
in fiction. Look at the Bancrofts and their 'doubles,' for instance, a
pair of them, husband and wife, who passed themselves off as Sir Squire
and Lady Bancroft innumerable times a few years back, and were never
discovered. And yet, though it mightn't be difficult for a clever
impersonator to make up like Bancroft, it seems incredible that he could
find a woman who could pose successfully as the incomparable Marie
Wilton. You should have seen her in her prime, my boy--the m