is mysterious ferocity. To her
great surprise, Anthony's voice sounded very much as usual, with perhaps
a slight tinge of grimness. "Miss Smith! No. I've seen no Miss Smith."

Mrs. Fyne seemed satisfied--and not much concerned really.

Flora, relieved, got clear away to her room upstairs, and shutting her
door quietly, dropped into a chair. She was used to reproaches, abuse,
to all sorts of wicked ill usage--short of actual beating on her body.
Otherwise inexplicable angers had cut and slashed and trampled down her
youth without mercy--and mainly, it appeared, because she was the
financier de Barral's daughter and also condemned to a degrading sort of
poverty through the action of treacherous men who had turned upon her
father in his hour of need. And she thought with the tenderest possible
affection of that upright figure buttoned up in a long frock-coat, soft-
voiced and having but little to say to his girl. She seemed to feel his
hand closed round hers. On his flying visits to Brighton he would always
walk hand in hand with her. People stared covertly at them; the band was
playing; and there was the sea--the blue gaiety of the sea. They were
quietly happy together . . . It was all over!

An immense anguish of the present wrung her heart, and she nearly cried
aloud. That dread of what was before her which had been eating up her
courage slowly in the course of odious years, flamed up into an access of
panic, that sort of headlong panic which had already driven her out twice
to the top of the cliff-like quarry. She jumped up saying to herself:
"Why not now? At once! Yes. I'll do it now--in the dark!" The very
horror of it seemed to give her additional resolution.

She came down the staircase quietly, and only on the point of opening the
door and because of the discovery that it was unfastened, she remembered
Captain Anthony's threat to stay in the garden all night. She hesitated.
She did not understand the mood of that man clearly. He was violent. But
she had gone beyond the point where things matter. What would he think
of her coming down to him--as he would naturally suppose. And even that
didn't matter. He could not despise her more than she despised herself.
She must have been light-headed because the thought came into her mind
that should he get into ungovernable fury from disappointment, and
perchance strangle her, it would be as good a way to be done with it as
any.

"You had that though