hronged the place on a fine
day from three o'clock till six.

Half a mile or more from the Abbey, a brown stream ran gurgling through
a miniature glen, to join the river below the park gates. This stream
had been Priscilla's great delight for longer than she could remember.
As children, she and her brother Mortimer had spent hours upon its mossy
banks, and since those days she had dreamed many dreams, aye, and shed
many tears, within sound of its rushing waters. She loved the place. It
was her haven of solitude. No one ever disturbed her there.

The walk across the park made them both hot, and it was a relief to sit
down on her favourite tree-root above the stream and yield herself to
the luxury of summer idleness. A robin was chirping far overhead, and
from the grass at her feet there came the whir of a grasshopper.
Otherwise, save for the music of the stream, all was still. An
exquisite, filmy drowsiness crept over her, and she slept.

A deep growl from her bodyguard roused her nearly an hour later, and she
awoke with a start.

Romeo was sitting very upright, watching something on the farther side
of the stream. He growled again as Priscilla sat up.

She looked across in the same direction, and laid a hasty hand upon his
collar.

What she saw surprised her considerably. A man was lying face downwards
on the brink of the stream, fishing about in the water, with one arm
bared to the shoulder. He must have heard Romeo's warning growl, but he
paid not the slightest attention to it. Priscilla watched him with keen
interest. She could not see his face.

Suddenly he clutched at something in the clear water, and immediately
straightened himself, withdrawing his arm. Then, quite calmly, he looked
across at her, and spoke in a peculiar, soft drawl like a woman's.

"You'll forgive me for disturbing you, I know," he said, "when I tell
you that all my worldly goods were at the bottom of this ditch."

He displayed his recovered property as if to verify his words--a brown
leather pocketbook with a silver clasp. Priscilla gazed from it to its
owner in startled silence. Her heart was beating almost to suffocation.
She knew this man.

The water babbled on between them, singing a little tinkling song all
its own. But the girl neither saw nor heard aught of her surroundings.
She was back in the heat and whirl of a crowded New York thoroughfare,
back in the fierce grip of this man's arms, hearing his quiet voice
above her head