table to write to Rufus Van Torp.

The letter was begun and she had written half a dozen lines when she
laid down the pen, to unlock a small drawer from which she took an old
blue envelope that had never been sealed, though it was a good deal
the worse for wear. There was a photograph in it, which she laid
before her on the letter; and she looked down at it steadily, resting
her elbows on the table and her forehead and temples in her hands.

It was a snapshot photograph of a young officer in khaki and puttees,
not very well taken, and badly mounted on a bit of white pasteboard
that might have been cut from a bandbox with a penknife; but it was
all she had, and there could never be another.

She looked at it a long time.

'You understand, dear,' she said at last, very low; 'you understand.'

She put it away again and locked the drawer before she went on with
her letter to Van Torp. It was easy enough to tell him what she had
learned about Feist from Logotheti; it was even possible that he had
found it out for himself, and had not taken the trouble to inform her
of the fact. Apart from the approval that friendship inspires, she had
always admired the cool discernment of events which he showed when
great things were at stake. But it was one thing, she now told him, to
be indifferent to the stupid attacks of the press, it would be quite
another to allow himself to be accused of murder; the time had come
when he must act, and without delay; there was a limit beyond which
indifference became culpable apathy; it was clear enough now, she
said, that all these attacks on him had been made to ruin him in the
estimation of the public on both sides of the Atlantic before striking
the first blow, as he himself had guessed; Griggs was surely not an
alarmist, and Griggs said confidently that Van Torp's enemies meant
business; without doubt, a mass of evidence had been carefully got
together during the past three months, and it was pretty sure that an
attempt would be made before long to arrest him; would he do nothing
to make such an outrage impossible? She had not forgotten, she could
never forget, what she owed him, but on his side he owed something to
her, and to the great friendship that bound them to each other. Who
was this man Feist, and who was behind him? She did not know why she
was so sure that he knew the truth, supposing that there had really
been a murder, but her instinct told her so.

Lady Maud was not gifted wit