ing," she said to herself.
She had telegraphed to Gregory last night, at once: "Karen is found.
Mercedes has gone to her. That's all I know yet."

She clung to the thought of Gregory's answer. Perhaps he, too, had news.
But she had no answer to her telegram. The post, instead, brought her a
letter from Gregory that had been written the morning before.

"Dear Mrs. Talcott," it ran. "Karen is found. The detectives
discovered that Mr. Franz Lippheim had not gone to Germany with his
family. They traced him to an inn in the New Forest. Karen is with
him and has taken his name. May I ask you, if possible, to keep
this fact from her guardian for the present.--Yours sincerely,

"Gregory Jardine."

When Mrs. Talcott had read this she felt herself overcome by a sudden
sickness and trembling. She had not yet well recovered from her illness
of the Spring. She crept upstairs to her room and went to bed.

CHAPTER XLI

It seemed to Karen, after hours had passed, that she had ceased to be
tired and that her body, wafted by an involuntary rhythm, was as light
as thistle-down on the wind.

She had crossed the Goonhilly Downs where the moonlight, spreading far
and wide with vast unearthly brightness, filled all the vision with
immensities of space and brought memories of strains from Schubert's
symphonies, silver monotonies of never-ending sound.

She had plunged down winding roads, blackly shadowed by their hedgerow
trees, passing sometimes a cottage that slept between its clumps of
fuchsia and veronica. She had climbed bare hill-sides where abandoned
mines or quarries had left desolate mementoes that looked in the
moonlight like ancient tombs and catacombs.

Horror lay behind her at Les Solitudes, a long, low cloud on the horizon
to which she had turned her back. The misery that had overpowered and
made her one with its dread realities lay beneath her feet. She was
lifted above it in a strange, disembodied enfranchisement all the night,
and the steady blowing of the wind, the leagues of silver, the mighty
sky with its far, high priestess, were part of an ecstasy of sadness,
impersonal, serene, hallucinated, like that of the music that
accompanied the rhythm of her feet.

The night was almost over and dawn was coming, when, on a long uphill
road, she felt her heart flag and her footsteps stagger.

The moon still rode sharp and high, but its light seemed concentrated in
its own glittering