o had admitted having business relations with Levi Levison, must be
the individual whom Mr. Travers Nugent suspected. Mr. Nugent had assured
her that he had ascertained that Levison had appointed to meet some one
on the marsh on the fatal evening. It followed as almost a certainty
that the appointment must have been with the gentleman who had a
mysterious connexion with Levison, the nature of which he refused to
divulge.

And now this _scelerat_, this assassin who had ruined her prospects by
untimely removing the amorous "financial agent," was making successful
love to Miss Violet. It was preposterous, and not to be countenanced for
a moment, that the murderer should carry off the great heiress, while
his cruel crime had relegated her, Louise Aubin, to a probable future of
celibate poverty. If only in her young mistress's interest, the
atrocious thing must be nipped in the bud.

But mademoiselle was endowed with a fair share of French caution, the
quality which kindly Nature supplies to balance French impulse, and she
was not going to jeopardize a comfortable and lucrative situation by
making a premature move. She must first put it beyond all doubt that the
man whom Mr. Levi Levison had arranged to meet on the marsh was the man
whom she had just seen in the rose garden, and to that end she must take
counsel with that dear gentleman who had saved her from the error of
denouncing Pierre Legros.

"Ce cher Monsieur Nugent--'e admire me just a leetle himself, I think,"
she murmured, as she tripped back to the house across the lawn. "I make
'im tell me all he knows."

Whereby Mademoiselle Louise Aubin showed herself to be of sanguine
temperament, but a poor student of the art of reading men.

Nevertheless, when Mr. Travers Nugent was sitting in his cosy
dining-room at The Hut that evening, peeling peaches and sipping his
claret in the soft glow of shaded lamps, his sphinx-like manservant,
Sinnett, entered, and, without a word, handed him a folded slip of
paper. Nugent read it with a twitch at the corner of his mouth, and
looked up sharply.

"Did any one beside yourself see this lady come?" he asked.

"Can't have, sir," was the reply. "She came to the front door, and I
admitted her myself. It is pitch-dark outside, so none of the maids can
have seen her walking up the drive."

"Then you can show her in," said Nugent. "It is business, Sinnett, but
we don't want any village scandal. There are a score of gossiping old
w