and swept tearfully from
the room.

CHAPTER XXXV

While his late worshippers were trampling his memory in the mire, the
Baron von Blitzenberg, deserted and dejected, his face still buried in
his hands, endured the slow passage of the doleful afternoon. Unlike the
prisoner at The Lash, who, by a coincidence that happily illustrates
the dispensations of Providence, was undergoing at the same moment an
identical ordeal, the Baron had no optimistic, whimsical philosophy to
fall back upon. Instead, he had a most tender sense of personal dignity
that had been egregiously outraged--and also a wife. Indeed, the thought
of Alicia and of Alicia's parent was alone enough to keep his head bowed
down.

"Ach, zey most not know," he muttered. "I shall give moch
money--hondreds of pound--not to let zem find out. Oh, what for fool
have I been!"

So deeply was he plunged in these sorrowful meditations, and so
constantly were they concerned with the two ladies whose feelings he
wished to spare, that when a hum of voices reached his ear, one of them
strangely--even ominously--familiar, he only thought at first that his
imagination had grown morbidly vivid. To dispel the unpleasant fancies
suggested by this imagined voice, he raised his head, and then the next
instant bounded from his chair.

"Mein Gott!" he muttered, "it is she."

Too thunderstruck to move, he saw his prison door open, and there,
behold! stood the Countess of Grillyer, a terrible look upon her
high-born features, a Darius at either shoulder. In silence they
surveyed one another, and it was Mr. Maddison who spoke first.

"Guess this is a friend of yours," he observed.

One thought and one only filled the prisoner's mind--she must leave him,
and immediately.

"No, no; I do not know her!" he cried.

"You do not know me?" repeated the Countess in a voice rich in promise.

"Certainly I do not."

"She knows you all right," said the millionaire.

"Says she does," put in Ri in a lower voice; "but I wouldn't lay much
money on her word either."

"Rudolph! You pretend you do not know me?" cried the Countess between
wrath and bewilderment.

"I never did ever see sochlike a voman before," reiterated the Baron.

"What do you say to that, ma'am?" inquired Mr. Maddison.

"I say--I blush to say--that this wretched young man is my son-in-law,"
declared the Countess.

As she had come to the house inquiring merely for Lord Tulliwuddle, and
been conducted straight