rs. Grey and I have called twice at your
apartments, but in vain, and now I leave this letter for you. It is
frightful, what has happened. Nina has gone, no one knows where; we
can hear nothing of her. This morning when I came down to her room
she was gone; there was a letter for me, one for Mr. Lehmann, one
for Miss Constance, asking her to be ready to sing to-morrow night,
another for Mrs. Grey, with money for the apartments until the end
of the month, and also there was this little packet for you. In her
letter to me she asks me to see them all delivered. During the
night she must have made these arrangements; in the morning she is
gone! I am in despair; I know not what to do. Will you have the
goodness to come down to-morrow as soon as possible?

"ESTELLE."

And then mechanically he drew a chair to the table, and sat down and
pulled the small package towards him; perhaps the contents might help to
explain this extraordinary thing that had occurred. But the moment that
he took the lid off the pasteboard box he was more bewildered than ever;
for the first glimpse told him that Nina had returned to him all the
little presents he had made to her in careless moments.

"Nina!" he said, under his voice, in a tone of indignant reproach.

Yes, here was every one of them, from the enclasped loving-cup to the
chance trinkets he had purchased for her just as they happened to
attract his eye. He took them all out; there was no letter, no message
of any kind. And then he asked himself, almost angrily, what sort of mad
freak was this. Had the wayward and petulant Nina--forgetting all the
suave and gracious demeanor she had been teaching herself since she came
to England--had she run away in a fit of temper, breaking her engagement
at the theatre, and causing alarm and anxiety to her friends, all about
nothing? For he and she had not quarrelled in any way whatsoever, as far
as he knew. One fancy, at least, never occurred to him--or, if it
occurred to him, it was dismissed in a moment--that Nina might have had
a secret lover; that she had honestly wished to return these presents
before making an elopement. It was quite possible that Nicolo Ciana, if
he had heard of Nina's success in England, might have pursued her, and
sought to marry so very eligible a helpmeet; but if the young man with
the greasy hair and the sham je