ome up the steps and address them, but he went on for
a short distance in an undecided way, thinking deeply, and trying hard
to see through the mental mist which shut him in. But a short time
before he had felt convinced that he had found the house and been
disappointed; now he felt quite as sure that the mansion where the two
servants were standing must be the place. He had no special reason for
coming to the conclusion, but all the same a curious feeling of
attraction made him slacken his pace, angry and annoyed the while that
he had not stopped and spoken to the men.

"Great heavens! What a vacillating moral coward I have grown," he said
to himself. "What would have been easier?"

He said this but felt that the task was terribly hard, for it seemed
such a childish thing to do--to go about asking folk if that was the
house where some people lived who had fetched him to attend a man who
had been shot, and kept him a prisoner for days and days before drugging
him and having him shut up in a cab to be driven about in the middle of
the night.

"Why, if I could explain all this to them," he said to himself at last,
"they'd think I was a harmless kind of madman, troubled with memories of
the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which I was trying to drag into
everyday life like a Barber's hundredth brother, or a one-eyed Calendar.
Come, come, old fellow," he continued, as he mentally apostrophised
himself; "go back home and prescribe for yourself, and then begin to
show someone that you have been suffering from a strange mental vagary,
brought about by over-excitement. She will believe it in time, and all
may come right again. Ah! how like."

He started and hurried after an open carriage in which two ladies were
seated. He only saw the profile of one of them very slightly, and her
back as she passed, but there was a turn of the figure--a particularly
graceful air, as she leaned forward to give some instruction to the
coachman--which struck him as being exactly similar to attitudes he had
seen Marion assume again and again when attending upon her brother.

He jumped into a cab and told the man to follow the victoria, with the
result that the latter came to a standstill in front of one of the
fashionable West-End drapery establishments.

Chester was close up as the lady alighted, and he sprang out excitedly
to go and speak to her.

There was every opportunity, for the carriage drove on with her
companion, and she cro