"Thank you for your kind letter, but I hope I now have a chance of getting some work, so that I need not trouble you any more.
"Yours faithfully,
"C. MOORE."
"Well! that's a relief," Rupert ejaculated, throwing the note into the fire; "what I could have done with the girl if she had agreed to meet me, heaven only knows. Margaret would have helped me—but Margaret——"
His meditations ended abruptly; he drew from his breast pocket a letter that had reached him a post or two before Christina's arrived, and for the fiftieth time read it from end to end. The sense of it had long since imprinted itself upon his brain, but it gave him a painful pleasure to let his eyes rest upon the well-formed letters of the handwriting, though a resentful indignation towards the writer stirred within him. She had not treated him well, and yet—she was the one woman in the world to him—this woman of the dark eyes and rare white beauty, who signed her letter with the one word, "Margaret." No address stood at the head of the letter, it was undated; and the postmark was that of the West Central district.
"Forgive me for having left London so abruptly, and without telling you of my intention," she wrote. "I was summoned away by telegram, and in my hurry and anxiety, I forgot to let you know. I cannot tell you my address just now, but Elizabeth is with me, and I am safe and well. I have often warned you, have I not, my dear, faithful friend, that much in my life must always seem to you strange and mysterious. I can give you no explanation now. But trust me still. MARGARET.
"Letters sent to me, c/o Mrs. Milton, 180, Gower Street, will be forwarded."
Mernside wrote four letters, each one of which in turn he tore up and flung into the fire as soon as it was written, finally writing a fifth, which appeared to satisfy him, for, having addressed and stamped it, he put it into his pocket when he went out.
"Drive sharply to 180, Gower Street," were his directions to the driver as he swung himself into a passing hansom, and leant forward on the closed doors, watching the traffic with listless glances, which only saw a woman's dark eyes, set in a white face.
"No, sir, I couldn't tell you Mrs. Stanforth's address," was the uncompromising reply to his question, and Mrs. Milton's inflexible countenance, and flat, rigid form were as uncompromising as her speech; "she bid me say to anyone enquiring, that she was gone in the country for a time, and I can only answer the same to you, as I answers to the rest. Letters and people—they come on here from Barford Road, and I says the same to all of 'em."
Rupert's creed as a gentleman forbade his pressing for the address of a woman who wished to keep herself hidden, but with all the hatred of his sex for mysteries, he moved impatiently away, speculating grimly on the eccentricities of women. Why, when she had a house of her own, did Margaret have her visitors and letters sent to Gower Street for information, or re-addressing respectively? What object was being served by all this mysterious behaviour? And why was she sometimes so apparently frank with him, at other times so strangely secret?