pose
of seeing and staying with an old servant, once a very confidential
maid for whom she had a great liking, and had often taken refuge with
when worried and in trouble. She thought, perhaps, to make this the
first stage in the rupture with my lord.

This maid had earnestly adjured her not to break with her husband, and
to return to Grosvenor Square.

This flight was the head and corner-stone of Lady Blackadder's
offending. It was interpreted into guilt of the most heinous kind; the
evidence in support of it seemed overwhelming. Witnesses swore
positively to the companionship of Major Forrester, both at Victoria
and Brighton, and it was to be fairly assumed that they were at the
latter place together.

No rebutting evidence was forthcoming. The maid, a woman married to an
ex-French or Swiss courier, by name Bruel, could not be produced,
simply because she could not be found in Brighton. They were supposed
to be settled there as lodging-house keepers, but they had not resided
long enough to be in the Directory, and their address was not known.
Lord Blackadder's case was that they were pure myths, they had never
had any tangible existence, but were only imported into the case to
support an ingenious but untenable defence.

It was more than hinted that they had been spirited away, and they
were not the first material witnesses, it was hinted, in an intricate
case, conducted by Messrs. Gadecker and Gobye, who had mysteriously
disappeared. So the plausible, nay, completely satisfactory
explanation of Lady Blackadder's visit to Brighton could not be put
forward, much less established, and there was no sort of hope for her.
She lost her case in the absence of the Bruels, man and wife. The
verdict was for Lord Blackadder, and he was adjudged to have the care
and custody of the child, the infant Viscount Aspdale.

I had not the smallest doubt when I realized with whom I had to do
that the unhappy mother had made a desperate effort to redress her
wrongs, as she thought them, and had somehow contrived to carry off
her baby before she could be deprived of it.

I had met her in full flight upon the Engadine express.

What next? Was she to be overtaken and despoiled, legally, of course,
but still cruelly, separated from her own flesh and blood? The Court
might order such an unnatural proceeding, but I was moved by every
chivalrous impulse to give her my unstinting and unhesitating support
to counteract it.

I was full of