here are notes." She dived into a bureau and thrust a handful upon
him. "With these alone you should be able to get to England or America;
and if you want more when you get there, write to Hilda Bouverie! As
long as she has any, there will be some for you!"

Tears filled her eyes. The simplicity of her girlhood had come back to
the seasoned woman of the world, at once spoiled and satiated with
success. This was the other side of the artistic temperament which had
enslaved her soul. She would swing from one extreme of wounded and
vindictive vanity to this length of lawless nobility; now she could
think of none but self, and now not of herself at all. Stingaree glanced
toward the window.

"I can't go yet, I'm afraid."

"You sha'n't! Why should you?"

"But I still fear they may not be satisfied downstairs. I am ashamed to
ask it--but will you do one little thing more for me?"

"Name it!"

"It is only to make assurance doubly sure. Go downstairs and let them
see you; tell them more details, if you like. Go down as you are, and
say that without your maid you could not find anything else to put on. I
promise not to vanish with everything in your absence."

"You do promise?"

"On my--liberty!"

She looked in his face with a very wistful sweetness.

"If they were to find me out," she said, "I wonder how many years they
would give _me_? I neither know nor care; it would be worth a few. I
thought I had lived since I saw you last . . . but this is the best fun
I have ever had . . . since Yallarook!"

She stood for a moment before opening the door that he unlocked for her,
stood before him in all her flushed and brilliant radiance, and blew a
kiss to him before she went.

The Governor was easily found. He was grieved at her troubling to
descend at such an hour, and did not detain her five minutes in all. He
thought she was in a fever, but that the fever became her beyond belief.
Reassured on every point, Miss Bouverie was back in her room but a very
few minutes after she had left it.

It was empty. She searched all over, first behind the curtains, then
between the pedestals of the bureau, but Stingaree was nowhere in the
room, and the bedroom door was still locked. It was a second look behind
the curtains that revealed an open window and the scratch of a boot upon
the white enamel. It was no breakneck drop into the shrubs.

So he had gone without a word, but also without breaking his word; for,
with wet eyes and