woman will be caught some day, and I shall have the pleasure of
prosecuting her for stealing my jewellery and things. The other
person--perhaps she is a little beneath my notice.'

She rang the bell, and Mrs. Strangeways, having no alternative,
slightly bent her head and withdrew.

Mrs. Carnaby had no engagement; she was quite at leisure, and, as usual
nowadays, spent her leisure in thought. She did not read much, and not
at all in the solid books which were to be seen lying about her rooms;
but Lady Isobel Barker, and a few other people, admired her devotion to
study. Certainly one or two lines had begun to reveal themselves on
Sibyl's forehead, which might possibly have come of late reading and
memory overstrained; they might also be the record of other
experiences. Her beauty was more than ever of the austere type; in
regarding her, one could have murmured--

Chaste a' the icicle
That's curded by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple.

But in privacy Sibyl did not look her best. Assuredly not after the
withdrawal of Mrs. Strangeways, when her lips, sneering away their fine
contour, grew to an ugly hardness, and her eyes smalled themselves in a
vicious intensity of mental vision.

CHAPTER 11

Major Carnaby, Hugh's brother, was now in England. A stranger to the
society in which Mrs. Carnaby had lived, he knew nothing of the gossip
at one time threatening her with banishment from polite circles. An
honest man, and taking for granted the honesty of his kinsfolk, he put
entire faith in Hugh's story, despatched to him by letter a few days
after the calamitous event at Wimbledon. On arriving in London, the
good Major was pleased, touched, flattered by the very warm welcome
with which his sister-in-law received him. Hitherto they had seen
hardly anything of each other; but since the disaster their
correspondence had been frequent, and Sibyl's letters were so brave,
yet so pathetic, that Major Carnaby formed the highest opinion of her.
She did not pose as an injured woman; she never so much as hinted at
the activity of slanderous tongues; she spoke only of Hugh, the dear,
kind, noble fellow, whom fate had so cruelly visited The favourable
impression was confirmed as soon as they met. The Major found that this
beautiful, high-hearted creature had, among her many virtues, a sound
capacity for business; no one could have looked after her husband's
worldly interests with more assiduity and c