nd, like the rest of us, lived in the
most absolute simplicity, but I noticed the crest on his linen, and in
some books. I knew him to be an English peer."

With a visible effort the woman controlled herself.

"Yes," she said in a voice strange in her own ears, "Yes, I know him.
Would--would you give me his address?"

He took out a card from his vest pocket, wrote a line or two, and
handed it to her in silence. As she read it her face grew almost
radiant with surprised delight.

"_Here_?" she murmured. "So near?"

She seemed incapable of further speech, and, seeing it, the gentleman
said quickly,

"You will pardon my officiousness. He is here in India, not many miles
out from Bombay, and I shall see him very soon. Am I to mention you?
I might--" he hesitated for the right words--"I could only say the
pleasantest things of you, and the most general, but I am his friend,
whom he claims to like and respect. If I am meddling with what is none
of my business--"

"No, no, you are all that is helpful and kind! Let me think--no, I
won't think--I have thought too much, and sometimes first impulses are
best. I will trust you fully. You have tact, you know the world. I
feel that you have guessed out a great deal of what it is hard to bring
myself to talk about. But this much I will say--the man you mention
was--no, is--my husband! For the rest, go to my good friend, the
captain; he will tell you all. Good-by, and thank you from my heart!"

They clasped hands silently--the two strangers whose life-threads had
been permitted to cross, just now, for some divine purpose, then the
woman, stirred to the depths, went to her stateroom, and the man stood
still for a time, looking out to sea. "Life is a wonder," he mused, "a
succession of surprises. When Duncan brought his men to the relief of
a stranger, set upon and nearly overwhelmed by an angry Chinese mob,
that day in Muen Yan's district, he did not imagine what might come of
it to his own advantage. I felt, from the minute I heard Lady
Moreham's name, that I had gotten hold of the other end of Duncan's
mystery, and I have not watched her so closely for nothing, all this
voyage. My misguided friend and his over-proud wife will meet more
happily than they parted, or I am much mistaken. I must wire him the
minute I touch land."

Just down the deck the girls were laughing merrily, as Hope, teased
into it by her sister, who was curious to know why she had faile