out of her when
she is married."

"In what way?" he asked.

"Hold those letters as a rod over her, threaten to bring an action
against her--she will never know that such an action cannot stand; or if
that does not do, threaten to show them to her husband. Rather than let
him know, rather than let Lord and Lady Ridsdale know, she will give you
thousands of pounds."

Allan Lyster for one-half moment shrank from his sister.

"It seems so very bad," he said.

"Not at all. She will have more money than she can count; you have a
right to some of it. Of course, you will never really tell, but why not
make what you can out of it? She would not even miss a thousand a year
and see what one thousand alone would do for you."

So it was settled--the fiendish plan that was to torture an innocent
woman until she was driven to shame and almost death. He wrote the
letter. Marion received it with silent disdain; she had told him that it
must all be at an end, and it should be so.

Then, as Adelaide had wisely forseen, there fell silence between them.
Adelaide wrote at intervals; in one letter she said:

"Allan has told me what passed between you." She made no further
comment; after a time she ceased even to mention his name in her
letters, and then Marion believed herself, in all honesty, free. She did
not forget her promise; she interested herself greatly in procuring
commissions for Allan Lyster; she persuaded Lord Ridsdale to order
several pictures from him; she sent very handsome presents to Adelaide,
and thanked Heaven that never again while she lived would she have a
secret.

How relieved, how happy she felt! Life was not the same to her, now that
this terrible burden was removed. She asked herself how she ever could
have been so blind and mad as to believe the feeling she entertained for
Allan Lyster was love.

A year passed, and, except for the favors she conferred upon him, the
orders that she had obtained for him, no news came to Marion of the man
who had been her lover. How was she to know that the web was weaving
slowly around her? It was silence like that of a tiger falling back for
a spring.

Then the great event of her life came to Marion Arleigh. She fell in
love, and this time it was real, genuine and true. Lady Ridsdale
insisted on her going to London for the season.

It was high time, she said, that Miss Arleigh, the heiress of Hanton,
was presented at court, and made her debut in the great world.

S