n as she was out of sight.

And now Winifred was at the front door, timidly pulling a bell. A man
strolled with a marked limp around the house from a conservatory. He was
a tall, strongly built person, and something in the dimly seen outline
sent a thrill of apprehension through her.

But the door opened.

"I have come--" she began.

The words died away in sheer affright. Glowering at her, with a queer
look of gratified menace, was Rachel Craik!

"So I see," was the grim retort. "Come in, Winnie, by all means. Where
have you been all these weeks?"

"There is some mistake," she faltered, white with sudden terror and
nameless suspicions. "My agent told me to come here--"

"Quite right. Be quick, or you'll miss the last train home," growled the
voice of Voles behind her.

Roughly, though not violently, he pushed her inside, and the door
closed.

He snapped at Rachel: "She'd be yelling for help in another second, and
you never know who may be passing."

Now, Winifred was not of the order of women who faint in the presence of
danger. Her love had given her a great strength; her suffering had
deepened her fine nature; and her very soul rebelled against the cruel
subterfuge which had been practised to separate her from her lover. She
saw, with the magic intuition of her sex, that the very essence of a
deep-laid plot was that Rex and she should be kept apart.

The visit of Mrs. Carshaw, then, was only a part of the same determined
scheme? Rex's mother had been a puppet in the hands of those who carried
her to Connecticut, who strove so determinedly to take her away when
Carshaw put in an appearance, and who had tricked her into keeping this
bogus appointment. She would defy them, face death itself rather than
yield.

In the America of to-day, nothing short of desperate crime could long
keep her from Rex's arms. What a weak, silly, romantic girl she had been
not to trust in him absolutely! The knowledge nerved her to a fine
scorn.

"What right have you to treat me in this way?" she cried vehemently.
"You have lied to me; brought me here by a forged letter. Let me go
instantly, and perhaps my just indignation may not lead me to tell my
agent how you have dared to use his name with false pretense."

"Ho, ho!" sang out Voles. "The little bird pipes an angry note. Be
pacified, my sweet linnet. You were getting into bad company. It was the
duty of your relatives to rescue you."

"My relatives! Who are they who cla