des of the study doorway, and then,
unsteadily, entered--and sank down upon the big chesterfield in utter
exhaustion.

Leroux, rubbing his chin, perplexedly, walked in after her. He
scarcely had his foot upon the study carpet, ere the woman started up,
tremulously, and shot out from the enveloping furs a bare arm and a
pointing, quivering finger.

"Close the door!" she cried hoarsely--"close the door!... He has...
followed me!"...

The disturbed novelist, as a man in a dream, turned, retraced his steps,
and closed the outer door of the flat. Then, rubbing his chin more
vigorously than ever and only desisting from this exercise to fumble in
his dishevelled hair, he walked back into the study, whose Athenean calm
had thus mysteriously been violated.

Two minutes to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable
Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist--and a pale-faced,
beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful
eyes straight before her. This was such a scene as his sense of the
proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted Henry
Leroux to create.

His visitor kept moistening her dry lips and swallowing, emotionally.

Standing at a discreet distance from her:--

"Madam," began Leroux, nervously.

She waved her hand, enjoining him to silence, and at the same time
intimating that she would explain herself directly speech became
possible. Whilst she sought to recover her composure, Leroux, gradually
forcing himself out of the dreamlike state, studied her with a sort of
anxious curiosity.

It now became apparent to him that his visitor was no more than
twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, but illness or trouble, or both
together, had seared and marred her beauty. Amid the auburn masses of
her hair, gleamed streaks, not of gray, but of purest white. The low
brow was faintly wrinkled, and the big--unnaturally big--eyes were
purple shaded; whilst two heavy lines traced their way from the corner
of the nostrils to the corner of the mouth--of the drooping mouth with
the bloodless lips.

Her pallor became more strange and interesting the longer he studied it;
for, underlying the skin was a yellow tinge which he found inexplicable,
but which he linked in his mind with the contracted pupils of her eyes,
seeking vainly for a common cause.

He had a hazy impression that his visitor, beneath her furs, was most
inadequately clothed; and seeking confirmation of