sting information!"

"I happened to see them at Waterloo together--evidently just arrived
from somewhere--and Tristram thought she was safe in Paris! Poor dear!"

"You have told him about it, of course?"--anxiously.

"I did just give him a hint."

"That was wise." And Lord Elterton smiled blandly and she did not see
the twinkle in his eye. "He was naturally grateful?" he asked
sympathetically.

"Not now, perhaps, but some day he will be!"

Laura's light hazel eyes flashed, and Lord Elterton laughed again as he
answered lightly,

"There certainly is a poor spirit in the old boy if he doesn't feel
under a lifelong obligation to you for your goodness. I should, if it
were me.--Look, though, we shall have to go now; they are beginning to
say good night."

And as they found the others he thought to himself, "Well, men may be
poachers like I am, but I am hanged if they are such weasels as women!"

Lady Anningford joined Lady Ethelrida that night in her room, after they
had seen Zara to hers, and they began at once upon the topic which was
thrilling them all.

"There is something the matter, Ethelrida, darling," Lady Anningford
said. "I have talked to Tristram for a long time to-night, and, although
he was bravely trying to hide it, he was bitterly miserable; spoke
recklessly of life one minute, and resignedly the next; and then asked
me, with an air as if in an abstract discussion, whether Hector and
Theodora were really happy--because she had been a widow. And when I
said, 'Yes, ideally so,' and that they never want to be dragged away
from Bracondale, he said, so awfully sadly, 'Oh, I dare-say; but then
they have children.' It is too pitiful to hear him, after only a week!
What can it be? What can have happened in the time?"

"It is not since, Anne," Ethelrida said, beginning to unfasten her
dress. "It was always like that. She had just the look in her eyes the
night we all first met her, at Mr. Markrute's at dinner--that strange,
angry, pained, sorrowful look, as though she were a furnace of
resentment against some fate. I remember an old colored picture we had
on a screen--it is now in the housekeeper's room--it was one of those
badly-drawn, lurid scenes of prisoners being dragged off to Siberia in
the snow, and there was a woman in it who had just been separated from
her husband and baby and who had exactly the same expression. It used to
haunt me as a child, and Mamma had it taken out of the old nursery. And