e door behind him. She
crossed to the bath-room, bathed her face in cold water and felt better,
though she was still a little giddy.

Then she sat down to review the situation, and in that review two
figures came alternately into prominence--van Heerden and Beale.

She was an eminently sane girl. She had had the beginnings of what might
have been an unusually fine education, had it not been interrupted by
the death of her foster-mother. She had, too, the advantage which the
finished young lady does not possess, of having grafted to the wisdom of
the schools the sure understanding of men and things which personal
contact with struggling humanity can alone give to us.

The great problems of life had been sprung upon her with all their
hideous realism, and through all she had retained her poise and her
clear vision. Many of the phenomena represented by man's attitude to
woman she could understand, but that a man who admittedly did not love
her and had no other apparent desire than to rid himself of the incubus
of a wife as soon as he was wed, should wish to marry her was
incomprehensible. That he had already published the banns of her
marriage left her gasping at his audacity. Strange how her thoughts
leapt all the events of the morning: the wild rush to escape, the
struggle with the hideously masked man, and all that went before or
followed, and went back to the night before.

Somehow she knew that van Heerden had told her the truth, and that there
was behind this act of his a deeper significance than she could grasp.
She remembered what he had said about Beale, and flushed.

"You're silly, Matilda," she said to herself, employing the term of
address which she reserved for moments of self-depreciation, "here is a
young man you have only met half a dozen times, who is probably a very
nice married policeman with a growing family and you are going hot and
cold at the suggestion that you're in love with him." She shook her head
reproachfully.

And yet upon Beale all her thoughts were centred, and however they might
wander it was to Beale they returned. She could analyse that buoyancy
which had asserted itself, that confidence which had suddenly become a
mental armour, which repelled every terrifying thought, to this faith
she had in a man, who in a few weeks before she had looked upon as an
incorrigible drunkard.

She had time for thought, and really, though this she did not
acknowledge, she desperately needed the occ