So saying, she gathers up her white skirts, and, without a touch of her hand, or even a last glance, flits like a lissome ghost across the moonlit paths of the garden, and so is gone.


CHAPTER XIII.

How Kit reads between the lines—How the Misses Blake show themselves determined to pursue a dissipated course, and how Monica is led astray by an apt pupil of Machiavelli.

Early next morning Bridget, Monica's maid, enters Kit's room in a somewhat mysterious fashion. Glancing all round the room furtively, as though expecting an enemy lying in ambush behind every chair and table, she says, in a low, cautious tone,—

"A letter for you, miss."

As she says this, she draws a note from beneath her apron, where, in her right hand, it has been carefully hidden,—so carefully, indeed, that she could not have failed to create suspicion in the breast of a babe.

"For me," says Kit, off her guard for once.

"Yes, miss."

"Who brought it?"