some secret part of her nature.

"Yes--marriage!" repeated the mother. Such an enormity was dreadful.

"It sounds too far-fetched! What will you do?"

"Senator Meiklejohn recommends me to approach the girl."

"Well, perhaps that is the best. But how to get her address? Perhaps if
I asked Rex he would tell it, without suspecting anything. On the other
hand, he might take alarm."

"Couldn't you say you had secured her a place on the stage, and make him
send her to you, to test her voice, or something? And then you could
send her on to me," said the elder woman.

"Yes, that might be done," answered Helen Tower. "I'd like to see her,
too. She must be extraordinarily pretty to capture Rex. Some of those
common girls are, you know. It is a caprice of Providence. Anyway, I
shall find her out, or have her here somehow within the next few days,
and will let you know. First of all, I'll write Rex and ask him to come
for bridge to-night."

She did this, but without effect, for Carshaw was engaged elsewhere,
having taken Winifred to a theater.

However, Meiklejohn was again at the bridge party, and when he asked
whether Mrs. Carshaw had paid a visit that afternoon, and the address of
the girl had been given, Helen Tower answered:

"I don't know it. I am now trying to find out."

The Senator seemed to take thought.

"I hate interfering," he said at last, "but I like young Carshaw, and
have known his mother many a year. It's a pity he should throw himself
away on some chit of a girl, merely because she has a fetching pair of
eyes or a slim ankle, or Heaven alone knows what else it is that first
turns a young man's mind to a young woman. I happen to have heard,
however, that Winifred Bartlett lives in a boarding-house kept by Miss
Goodman in East Twenty-seventh Street. Now, my name must not--"

Helen Tower laughed in that dry way which often annoyed him.

"Surely by this time you regard me as a trustworthy person," she said.

So Fowle had proven himself a capable tracker, and Winifred's
persecutors were again closing in on her. But who would have imagined
that the worst and most deadly of them might be the mother of her Rex?
That, surely, was something akin to steeping in poison the assassin's
dagger.

CHAPTER XV

THE VISITOR

"Are you Miss Winifred Bartlett?" asked Mrs. Carshaw the next afternoon
in that remote part of East Twenty-seventh Street which for the first
time bore the rubber tires of her limou