e was safe once
more inside his lordship's stables--he told, with bulging eyes and bated
breath, what he had seen. Whereupon the head coachman forthwith informed
his wife, who at once poured it into the ears of the housekeeper,
who, being jealous of my lady, fearing her dominance, lost no time in
amplifying the details to Lord Carnavon. That gentleman had walked his
library the rest of the night and, on my lady's return from Scotland,
two mornings later (she had "spent the night with her aunt"), had
denounced her in tones so shrill that every word was heard at the end
of the long gallery; the tirade, to his lordship's amazement, being cut
short by his daughter's defiant answer: "And why not, if I love him?"

All of which accounts for the infamous order roared five minutes later
by the distinguished nobleman to his coachman, who, having known her
ladyship from a child and loved her accordingly, had not set her down
on the main road, but had taken her to a cottage on an adjoining
estate--her second change of roofs--from whence Dalton carried her off
next day to Ostend, a refuge she had herself selected, the season there
being then at its height.

Had either of them kept a diary, it is safe to say that the delirious
hours which filled that first week at Ostend would have been checked off
in gold letters. Neither of them had ever been so blissfully happy, nor
so passionately enamoured of the other, nor so overjoyed that the dreary
past, with all its misunderstandings, calumnies, and injustice, had been
wiped out forever.

There had, of course, been a few colorless moments. On a certain
Saturday, for instance, the eminent ex-financier, having lost his head
after the manner of some born gamblers, had, at the Casino, played
the wrong number--a series of wrong numbers, in fact--an error which
resulted in his pushing a crisp bundle of Bank of England notes--almost
all he had with him--toward the spidery hands of a suave gentleman with
rat eyes and bloodless face, who gathered them up with a furtive, deadly
smile.

The gold Letters might have been omitted here, and, in their stead, my
lady could have made a common pinhole to remind her, if she ever cared
to remember, that it was on that very night that her passionately
enamoured lover had helped her unfasten from her throat a string of
pearls which O'Day had given her, and which, strange to say, for a
woman so injured, so maligned, and so misunderstood, she, with Dalton's
ad