E-text prepared by D Alexander
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
([http://www.pgdp.net])
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
([http://www.archive.org])

THE
LATE TENANT

BY

GORDON HOLMES

Author of [“A Mysterious Disappearance,”]
“The Arncliffe Puzzle.”

New York

Edward J. Clode

156 Fifth Avenue
1906

Copyright, 1906, by
EDWARD J. CLODE

Entered at Stationers Hall

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

CONTENTS

The Late Tenant

CHAPTER I

A WHIFF OF VIOLETS

“I suppose one becomes used to this sort of thing in time,” thought David Harcourt, as he peered through the dusty plate-glass windows of his third-floor flat. “At present I can appreciate the feelings of a Wyoming steer when he first experiences the restraint of a cattle-truck. Or am I a caged bird? or a menagerie ape? or a mere ass? There is something in the evolution theory, after all. Obviously, one of my respected ancestors is kicking.”

Then, being a cheerful soul, he laughed, and turned from the outer prospect to face the coziness of his new abode. He did not understand yet that in No. 7, Eddystone Mansions, picked almost at haphazard from a house-agent’s list, he had hit upon a residence singularly free from the sort of thing which induced this present fit of the blues. In the first place, owing to a suit in chancery, the “eligible” building-site opposite was vacant, and most of the windows of No. 7 commanded an open space. Secondly, the street itself did not connect two main thoroughfares; hence its quietude was seldom disturbed by vehicles. Thirdly, and, perhaps, most important of all, his neighbors, above, below, and on three sides, were people who had achieved by design what he had done by accident—they had taken up their abode in Eddystone Mansions on account of the peace thus secured in the heart of London.

For London has a stony heart with wooden arteries, through which the stream of life rushes noisily. To ears tuned by the far-flung silence of the prairie this din of traffic was thunderous. To eyes trained by the smooth horizon it was bewildering to see a clear sky overhead and a sun sinking slowly, like a dim Chinese fire-balloon, into a compound of smoke and chimneys. In fact, David Harcourt came to the conclusion that Londoners, as a race, must be purblind and somewhat deaf.

“I wonder if I can stand it?” he commented. “I saw a map of South Africa in a shop window to-day. It looked wonderfully attractive. Yes, I am beginning to believe there is neither claw nor feather in my composition. ‘Kicking’ is the right word—hoof—ass! Oh! the line of descent is clear.” Then he laughed again, taking a box of cigars off the top of a bookcase, and any one who heard him laugh would have grasped the reason why men soon called him “Davie,” and women smiled when he looked at them.

Dame Nature, aided by his less remote ancestors in the evolutionary tree, had been good to him. It would have needed the worst “environment” ever dreamed of by sociology to make him a degenerate. As it was, a healthy upbringing, a fair public-school education, and the chance that a relation of his owned a Wyoming ranch, joined in fashioning an excellent specimen of lusty and clean-souled young manhood. But that same general wet-nurse, who had intended David to lord it over herds and vast pastures, had complicated matters by throwing a literary kink into the deftly coiled strands of his composition. Thus, at the age of twenty-five, he took more interest in scribbling stories and searching for rimes than in toting up the proceeds of sales at Chicago stock-yards. Worse than that, having oft imagined and striven to depict various ethereal creatures typical of the Spirit of the Dawn, the Fairy of the Dell, or the Goddess of the Mist, he had refused, most emphatically, to wed the elderly rancher’s daughter, his relative, a lady blessed with more wealth and weight than was necessary for any one woman in the world.

So, like many another youngster in the far lands, he heard the voice of London calling through every book and newspaper he read. It was a siren voice, devoid of accent. The Wyoming wooing, too, became a serious matter; hence, like one of the dove-eyed oxen he knew so well, he stampeded in sudden panic, realized his personal possessions, and, in the vernacular of Sioux Pass, “lit out for the nearest depot, an’ boarded an east-bound train.”

He had now been in England a month, in London a week. From the landing-stage at Liverpool he had gone to visit the country cousins who superintended his childhood and education after the death of his mother, that lady having been stricken down by the hand which killed her soldier husband at Dargai. He found the cousins snug in their Bedfordshire nest. The squire-like head of the household wondered dully why any man should quit a place where he could “get on” to seek a precarious livelihood in a land which was “rapidly going to the dogs.” David certainly received more encouragement from the younger members of the family, especially from a bright-eyed maiden of eighteen, who thought London “awfully jolly,” and vowed a literary career to be “quite too devey for anything.”

But David was level-headed enough to see that the verdict of squire and maid were equally unfavorable.

Then followed a few days in a big hotel. He paid a round of useless calls at the offices of magazines that, to his certain knowledge, printed all sorts of rubbishy articles about cow-boy life, but opposed a phalanx of commissionaires against a man who could not only round up an infuriated herd, but could also describe the feat deftly with a pen. Ultimately, he resolved to lay siege to the citadel which he was unable to storm, and pitch his camp over against the tents of the enemy. He took a furnished flat, “with plate and linen, gas-stove, electric light, bath H. and C.,” for six months.

In thus becoming a Londoner, he encountered the first quaint anomaly of London life. When he drove up to the door of the most fashionable hotel in the West End, and deposited a couple of portmanteaus in a bed-room after signing the register, he was permitted to run a bill for a week, at least, without let or hindrance; but when he offered to pay cash in advance for the flat, he met with a demand for “references.”

The agent was firm but explanatory. “It is not my client, but the over-landlord, who makes that stipulation,” he said. “In fact, the letting is wholly in my hands, as the late tenant is dead; but, for certain reasons, the residuary legatees wish to keep the place in its present condition until the lease expires a year hence.”

“Did the late tenant die there?” asked David.

“Well—yes—fully five months since; there have been other occupants subsequently, and the terms are so reasonable—”

“What did he, or she, die of?” persisted David. He was accustomed to reading men’s faces, and he had caught a certain fluttering of the agent’s eyelids.

“Nothing to cause any alarm, nothing infectious, I assure you. People—er—die in flats just the same as—er—in private houses.” This, being a joke, had its chuckle.

But the agent also knew men in his own way, and he felt it was unwise to wriggle. David had a steadfast glance. He gave others the impression that he heard and treasured each word they uttered. He was really wondering then why the speaker’s neck was so long and thin—nothing more serious, but, with a disagreeable disclosure lurking in the other’s mind, David’s scrutiny compelled candor.

“The thing is bound to come to your ears sooner or later, Mr. Harcourt; so I may as well tell you now,” said the Londoner. “The late tenant was a lady, a singer of much promise, it was said. For an unknown reason—probably some love affair was disturbing her rest—she—er—took an overdose of a sleeping-draft. She was a very charming woman, quite young, of highest character. It is inconceivable that she should have committed suicide. The affair was an accident, of course, but—er—”

“A sceptical coroner thought it a murder?”

“Oh, dear, no, nothing of the kind, not a hint of such a thing. Fact is—well, it sounds ridiculous to say with reference to a popular block of flats in the middle of London, but two foolish women—an excitable actress and her servant, your predecessors in the flat—have spread reports as to queer noises. Well, you know, don’t you? the sort of nonsense women will talk.”

“In plain English, they say the place is haunted.”

“Ha, ha! Something in that nature. You have hit it! Something in that nature. Absurd thing!”

“Who knows?” David had a cold disbelief in spooks, but it amused him to see the agent squirm; and he sat tight. Those eyelids fluttered again, and Mr. Dibbin banged a ledger with wrathful fist.

“Look here, Mr. Harcourt,” cried he finally. “This is a five-guineas-a-week flat. I’ll make you a fair offer; take it for six months and I give it you at half price.”

“I laying the ghost at two and a half guineas weekly?”

“Put it any way you like. If a man of sound common-sense like you lives there for a considerable period, the wretched affair will be forgotten; so it is worth the loss to me, and it is a first-class bargain for you.”

“Done!” said David.

The agent was so pleased that his annoyance vanished; he promised to secure a woman whom he knew to look after the new tenant’s housekeeping. She had probably never heard of the Eddystone Mansions tragedy. He would have her in the flat within four days. Meanwhile a charwoman might attend to things generally.

The references having proved satisfactory, David was now passing his first evening in his new abode. He had purchased some books and stationery; his charwoman had left him; and, when the door had closed behind her, he turned from the head of the dead girl in chalks over the mantelpiece to gaze out of the dining-room window, and back again to the sweet face in chalks, to return presently to the window.

It was a Thursday evening in the last week of January. The housekeeper was to arrive on Saturday. David fixed Monday as a good day to start work. In the interim he meant to loaf, dine at noteworthy restaurants, read, and go to theaters.

A man accustomed to guide his movements by the position of mountain-ranges or the stars, and count distances by his days on horseback, is likely to find himself all unhinged within a four-mile radius. David was in the novice stage of acquaintanceship with the magnetic life of the world’s capital. Not yet did the roar of London sing in familiar harmonies; the crunch of the omnibuses, the jingle of the hansoms, made no music in his ears. There was something uncanny in the silence of the millions eddying through the streets. Where all else was clamor, mankind was dumb, save for the shouts of the newsboys, the jabber of bus-conductors, the cries of itinerant venders.

So David, having dressed and gone out, wandered into another restaurant than that which he was aiming for; dawdled over the meal until the first act of the play which he meant to see must have been ended; and decided then upon a music-hall; finally, he strolled back toward Eddystone Mansions as early as eleven.

The elevator, placed in the center of the building, ran from the basement floor; those who used it had to descend a few steps from the entrance and advance along a passage. Harcourt felt unaccountably tired—there is a strain of life in London as on the tops of mountains—so he chose the lift in preference to the stairs.

The hall-porter, who sat within the lift, pondering the entries for the Spring Handicaps, recognized him, and jumped up with a salute.

“Good-evenin’, sir! Fine, frosty night, sir,” said he. They began to ascend. A thought occurred to David. “What was the name of the lady who occupied No. 7?” he asked.

“Miss Ermyn L’Estrange, sir,” was the instant answer.

Even in the wilds of Wyoming one grasps the significance of certain classes of names. For instance, not even the rawest tenderfoot would expect “One-eyed Pete” to turn out to be a parson.

“I mean the lady who died here,” said David.

The porter stopped the lift. “Your floor, sir,” he said. “I’ve only bin in these ’ere flats a matter o’ two months, sir.”

“Good egg!” cried David. “Have a cigar, porter. You are a man to be depended on. But surely there is no harm in telling me the poor girl’s name. It must have appeared in all the newspapers.”

The attendant tickled his head underneath his hat. The new tenant of No. 7 seemed a nice gentleman, anyhow. He looked up and down the stairs, of which two sections were visible from the landing where they stood.

“I ’ave ’eard,” said he, “that a young lydy used ter live ’ere of the nyme of Miss Gwendoline Barnes.”

“Ah, that sounds more like it. Good-night.”

“Good-night, sir.”

Harcourt, fumbling over the intricacies of the lock, heard the rattle of the lift as it reached the basement. On his landing were two doors, his own and that of No. 8; and light shone from his neighbor’s dwelling. That was companionable. The stairs, too, were well lighted.

At last he gave the key the right pressure, and the latch yielded. He passed within and closed the door noiselessly. The electric switch governing the hall-lamp was on the wall beyond the short entrance-passage. He removed his overcoat and hat in the semi-darkness; the sheen coming through the corrugated-glass panels of the outer door did not so much as cast a shadow.

All at once he detected a fragrance of violets, faintly, but distinctly. This was puzzling! He knew that it was almost impossible for that scent to have been there earlier in the evening when he was at home, without being marked by him. Even now not one man in a thousand in London that night would have caught the subtle perfume; but David retained the hunter’s senses. As he stood in suspense, a feeling peeped and grew up within him that the odor carried with it a suggestion of death; his muscles grew taut, ready to fight, to defend himself against this world or the next.

The next instant he smiled, thinking: “Nonsense! It must have been here before. Each time I came in I was smoking; the air is frosty, too.”

He groped inward for the switch, turned on the light, and, without deigning to give another thought to the smell of violets, turned to the left along the main corridor, which was rectangular to the entrance-hall. Passing the drawing-room door, he entered the dining-room. Opposite the latter was the kitchen and servants’ apartments. Around the other end of the main corridor were disposed three bed-rooms and a bath-room. The light he had turned on illuminated entrance and corridor alike.

In the dining-room he found the fire still burning. That was good. The coal-scuttle was not by the fireplace, but in a corner. He went to get a shovelful of coal; and as he stooped, again came to him the fragrance, thrilling, bringing with it a picture of a girl whom he had once seen lying in funereal state, surrounded by flowers, and clothed in the last white robes of earth.

David stabbed the coals with the shovel. “What’s wrong with me?” he half laughed. Yet his eyes sought the crayon drawing of Gwendoline Barnes.

Presently he lit a cigar, unfolded an evening paper which he had bought in the streets, and tried to take an interest in the news of this new-old world into which he was new-born.

But his mind wandered. Without he heard the distant rumble of traffic; hansoms were beginning to arrive in the street beneath; he heard doors slam; the jingling of bells on head-stalls; feet pattering across the pavement; a driver’s tongue-click, and away would jog a horse, to be stirred, perhaps, into sudden frenzy by two shrills of a far-off whistle.

A contrast, these sounds, to the twig-snapping and grass-rustling of a night on the plains! There, lying by the camp-fire embers, he had heard the coyote slinking past in the dark, while the tethered horses suspended their cropping to hearken. Here men and streets made a yet stranger wilderness. He sat over the hearth absorbed by it, already yielding his tribute to the greatness of the outer ocean of life.

But prairie or city, man must sleep. David rose and went to the sideboard for a decanter. A certain graceful slowness characterized his movements. Town-bred men might have been deceived thereby, might reason that he was lethargic, of strapping physique, certainly, yet a man who could be hit three times before he countered once. It is this error of judgment which leads to accidents when town-dwellers encounter the denizens of the jungle. Harcourt’s hand was outstretched for the decanter when he became aware that he was not alone in the flat. The knowledge was derived from neither sight nor sound. It was intuitive, a species of feeling through space, an imperative consciousness that he shared his suite of apartments with another distinct, if intangible, being. Many men might not have had it, but Harcourt had it clearly.

Instantly he was rigid. This time he was weaving no fantasy round a whiff of violets. The sense of nearness to other presences is really inherent in man. Residence in settled communities dulls it, but in David Harcourt it was a living faculty. He stood motionless, waiting for some simple proof of his belief.

The door, veiled by a portière, was not closed, but sufficiently closed to prevent any view of the corridor, which, otherwise, it commanded throughout. The flat was carpeted so thickly that movement was silenced. But David fancied that a woman’s dress did brush somewhere against wall or floor. That was enough. He was about to spring forward and pull the door open to see, when he heard, or thought that he heard, the switch of the light outside click, as if it had been carefully raised. And on the instant, without hesitation, he pushed up the switch in the dining-room, and hid himself in darkness. There are wolves, too, in the London desert.

Now, like a bush-cat, he crept to the door, opened it, and peeped out. Certainly the light which he had left burning had been extinguished by some hand; the corridor was in darkness.

Nerves, as commonly understood, did not much enter into Harcourt’s scheme of things. But his heart beat quicker. The speed of thought cannot be measured. Many questions, and one doubt, one question, flitted through his brain. He stood in deep gloom; near him, he was convinced, was something in the guise of woman. The face in chalks on the mantelpiece seemed to crowd the dark, the face of the woman who had been hovering on the verge of his consciousness ever since the agent had mentioned her to him.

CHAPTER II

A SIGNATURE WITH A FLOURISH

He was collected enough, though the blood was rather cool in his veins, and there was an odd sensitiveness at the roots of his hair. “Who is there?” he asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

There was no answer, and now he had a feeling that the presence was drawing nearer.

He was unarmed, of course. The inseparable six-shooter of the West lay at the bottom of a cabin-trunk in his bed-room. But his faculties were exerted to an extent hardly possible to men who have not lived close to wild nature. He conceived that his safety demanded the exercise not only of pluck, but of artifice. So he stepped softly to the corner by the entrance to the servants’ apartments, and, standing there, sought a loose match in his waistcoat pocket, and held it against the wall, ready to light it at an instant’s notice. He did not mean to sacrifice to any chivalric nonsense about sex the opening move in what might prove to be a game of life or death. The woman, or whatever it was, showed by her conduct that she was not there by some mischance capable of explanation; he would determine by her first move, by the first flash of light, how to deal with her; and, if there were others with her, her body would be his shield until he gained the outer door and staircase. And so he waited, with the alert patience of an Indian, poised on the very tip-toe of action.

But as time passed, and there was no further sign of life in the corridor, the situation became over trying. He formulated a fresh plan. Behind him lay the kitchen, with its fire-irons, and thither he ran, seized a poker, then rushing out again, had the corridor, the drawing-room, every room, alight. But he saw no one.

He searched each room with eager haste, but there was nothing out of the common to be discovered. The front door was closed as he had left it. He ran into the exterior lobby, and, keeping an eye on the exit, summoned the elevator. Up it came; but the porter, throwing open the doors, checked his ready salute in his alarm at the sight of “No. 7” facing him poker in hand.

“Have you seen a lady go out?” demanded David.

The man drew back, one hand on his lever and the other on a sliding trellis-work of iron.

“N-no, sir,” he stammered.

“Don’t be frightened,” said David, sharply. “I want you to keep your wits. Some one has been in my flat—”

“Is that so, sir?”

“Where have you been during the last five minutes?”

“Down-stairs, sir.”

“At the door?”

“No, sir, in the back, not five yards from the lift, sir.” He thought it unnecessary to mention that he had been talking to the housemaid of No. 2, in the basement on her way to the post.

“So any one could have gone out without your knowledge?”

“If they went by the stairs, sir.”

“Come in and help me to search my place again.”

The porter hung back. The man’s sheepish face was almost comical.

“Come, come,” said David, “there isn’t much to be afraid of now, but I tell you that some one put out the light in the corridor, and I am almost sure that I heard the stir of a woman’s dress somewhere.”

The lift-attendant’s pallor increased.

“That’s just it, sir,” he murmured. “The others have heard it, too.”

“Stuff!” said David, turning on his heel.

Few Britons can stand contempt. The porter followed him.

“That’s a man,” said David, and they entered the flat. Harcourt shut and bolted the door.

“Now,” he said, “you mount guard in the passage, while I carry on the hunt.”

He would have disturbed a mouse were it in hiding, so complete was his second scrutiny of every nook. At the end of a fruitless quest he gave the porter a whisky and soda.

“I’ll tell you wot, sir,” said the man, “there’s more in this than meets the heye. Miss L’Estrange, she never saw anythink, but she ’eard all sorts o’ rummy noises, an’ twiced she found that all ’er things ’ad bin rummidged. An’ it was no thief, neither. The maid, she acshully sawr the pore lydy. If I may s’y it in confidence, sir, and you wants ter be comfortable, there’s No. 18 in the next block—”

“I have rented the place for six months, and I shall stay in it,” said David. “Have another? No? Well, here is half a crown. Say nothing about to-night’s adventure. I am going to bed.”

“Lordy! Goin’ ter sleep ’ere alone?” gasped his companion. “I wouldn’t do it for a pension.”

“Yet I am paying for the privilege. However, not a word, remember.”

“Right you are, sir. ’Ope you’ll ’ave a good night’s rest, sir. I’ll be in the lift for another ’arf hour, if you should ’appen to want me.”

Left to himself, David bolted the outer door again, and returned to the dining-room. Obeying an impulse, he jotted down some notes of the occurrence, paying special heed to times and impressions. Then he went to bed, having locked his bed-room door and placed his revolver under his pillow. He imagined that he would remain awake many hours, but, tired and overwrought, he was soon asleep, to be aroused only by the news-agent’s effort to stuff a morning paper into the letter-box. The charwoman was already in the flat, and the sun was shining through the drawn-thread pattern of the blinds.

“The air of London must be drugged,” thought David, looking at his watch. “Asleep at half-past eight of a fine morning!”

Such early-morning reproaches mark the first stage of town life.

After breakfast he went to his bank. He had expended a good deal of money during the past month, but was well equipped in substantials, owned a comfortable home for six months—barring such experiences as those of the preceding night—and found at the bank a good balance to his credit.

“I will hold on until I have left two hundred pounds of my capital and earnings combined,” he decided; “then I shall take the next mail steamer to some place where they raise stock.”

He called at the agent’s office.

“Nothing amiss, I hope?” said Mr. Dibbin.

“Nothing, whatever. I just happened in to get a few pointers about Miss Gwendoline Barnes.”

Harcourt found that in London it was helpful to use Americanisms in his speech. People smiled and became attentive when new idioms tickled their metropolitan ears. But the mention of the dead tenant of No. 7 Eddystone Mansions froze Dibbin’s smile.

“What about her? Poor lady! she might well be forgotten,” he said.

“So soon? I suppose you knew her?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“Nice girl?”

The agent bent over some papers. He seemed to be unable to bear Harcourt’s steady glance.

“She was exceedingly good-looking,” he answered; “tall, elegant figure, head well poised, kind of a face you see in a Romney, high forehead, large eyes, small nose and mouth—sort of artist type.”

“Wore a lot of lace about the throat?”

“What? You know that?”

“Oh, don’t be startled,” said Harcourt. “There is her head in chalks you know, over the mantelpiece—”

“Ah, true, true.”

“I wonder if it was she or some other lady who was in my flat last night at half-past eleven.”

Dibbin again started, stared at Harcourt, and groaned.

“If it distresses you, I will talk of something else,” said Harcourt.

“Mr. Harcourt, you don’t realize what this means to me. That block of buildings brings me an income. Any more talk of a ghost at No. 7 will cause dissatisfaction, and the proprietary company will employ another agency.”

“Now, let us be reasonable. Even if I hold a séance every night, I shall stick to my contract without troubling a board of directors. I am that kind of man. But, meantime, you should help me with information.”

Dibbin blinked, and dabbed his face with a handkerchief. “Ask me anything you like,” he said.

“When did Miss Barnes die?”

“On July 28 of last year. She lived alone in the flat, employing a non-resident general servant. This woman left the flat at six o’clock on the previous evening. At half-past eight A. M. next day, when she tried to let herself in, the latch appeared to be locked. After some hours’ delay, when nothing could be ascertained of Miss Barnes’s movements, though she was due at a music-master’s that morning and at a rehearsal in the afternoon, the door was forced, and it was discovered that the latch was not only locked but a lower bolt had been shot home, thus proving that the unhappy girl herself had taken this means of showing that her death was self-inflicted.”

“Why do you say that, if a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of ‘Death from Misadventure’?”

Mr. Dibbin’s eyes shifted again slightly. “That was—er—what one calls—”

“I see. The verdict was virtually one of suicide?”

“It could not well be otherwise. She had purchased the sleeping-draft herself, but, unfortunately, fortified it with strychnine. How else could the precautions about the door be explained? That is the only means of egress. Each window is sixty feet from the ground.”

“Did she rent the flat herself?”

“No. That is the only really mysterious circumstance about the affair. It was taken on a three years’ agreement, and furnished for her, by a gentleman.”

“Who was he?”

“No one knows. He paid cash in advance for everything.”

David was surprised. “Say, Mr. Dibbin,” he queried, “how about the ‘references’ upon which the over-landlord insisted in my case?”

“What are references worth, anyhow?” cried the agent, testily. “In this instance, when inquired into by the police, they were proved to be bogus. A bundle of bank-notes inspires confidence when you are a buyer, and propose to part with them forthwith.”

“Surely suspicions were aroused?”

The agent coughed discreetly. “This is London, you know. Given a pretty girl, a singer, a minor actress, who leaves her home and lives alone in apartments exceedingly well furnished, what do people think? The man had sufficient reasons to remain unknown, and those reasons were strengthened ten-fold by the scandal of Miss Barnes’s death. She left not even a scrap of paper to identify him, or herself, for that matter. All we had was his signature to the agreement. It is, I believe, a false name. Would you care to see it?”

“Yes,” said David.

Dibbin took some papers from a pigeonhole. Among them David recognized the deed he had signed a few days earlier. A similar document was now spread before him. It bore the scrawl, “Johann Strauss,” with the final S developed into an elaborate flourish.

“A foreigner,” observed David.

“Possibly. The man spoke excellent English.”

“Have you ever heard of Lombroso, Mr. Dibbin?”

“Lombroso? I have seen the name, somewhere in Soho, I think.”

“Not the same,” said David with due gravity. “The man I mean is an Italian criminologist of great note. He lays it down as a principle that a signature of that kind is a sign of moral degeneracy. Keep an eye on those among your clients who use such a flourish, Mr. Dibbin.”

“Good gracious!” cried the agent, casting a glance at the well-stuffed letter-cases of his office. How many moral degenerates had left their sign manual there!

“Two more questions,” went on Harcourt. “Where do Miss Barnes’s relatives reside?”

“Her name was not Barnes,” was the instant answer; “but I am pledged to secrecy in that regard. There is a mother, a most charming woman, and a sister, both certainly most charming ladies, of a family very highly respected. They did not discover the unhappy girl’s death until she was long laid to rest—”

“Then, why is the flat still in the condition in which Miss Barnes inhabited it?”

“Ah, that is simple enough. Isn’t the agreement valid for nearly a year yet? When that term expires, I shall dispose of the furniture and hand over the proceeds to the young lady’s heirs-at-law, subject to direction, of course, in case the real lessee ever puts in a claim.”

David strolled out into the crowded solitude of the streets, with a vague mind of Gwendoline Barnes and Johann Strauss, two misty personalities veiled under false names. But they so dwelt in his mind that he asked himself if he had fled from the pursuit of a living woman in far Wyoming to be haunted by a dead one in England? Like most strangers in London, he turned to the police for counsel, and told to an inspector on duty at a police-station his tale of the whiff of violets, of the extinguished light in his corridor, and of the real or fancied brush of a woman’s skirt somewhere against wall or carpet. He was listened to with kindliness, though, of course, without much faith. However, he learned from the inspector the address of the coroner’s court where the inquest had probably been held; it was near by, and David’s steps led him thither. There he asked some questions at haphazard, without picking up anything of fresh interest; unless it was that “Gwendoline Barnes” lay buried in Kensal Green cemetery.

It was now late in the afternoon. He strolled down Tottenham Court Road into Holborn, ate a deferred luncheon in Oxford-St., and started to saunter back home, shirking a theater matinée, which was irksome since it was the fixed thing on his program. But it struck him half-way home that his charwoman was gone, that the flat was lonely; he got into a cab, saying to the driver: “Kensal Green cemetery!”

Some electric lamps were a-flicker already in the streets. It was nearly the hour at which London roars loudest, when the city begins to pour out its hordes, and vans hurry to their bourne, with blocks in the traffic, and more haste, less speed. When he reached the cemetery the closing time was imminent.

A little snow lay among the graves, through which the grass-tufts showed, making a ground of black-and-white. Some few stars had ventured to peep from the wintry sky. A custodian supplied David with the formal information which he sought. The plot of ground had been bought in perpetuity; it was in a shaded place a good distance from the entrance; an Iona cross, erected by friends, marked the spot, bearing the one word, “Gwendoline.”

“It is late, sir,” said the man. But mighty is the power of the tip, even in cemeteries.

David walked down an avenue of the dead toward the little mound that covered the young actress. He was perhaps twenty yards from it when he heard and almost stopped at the sound of a sob not far away. He looked on this hand and on that, but could see no one. The place, with its silent populace, was more lonesome than the prairie; and a new sense had been steadily growing up in him since half-past eleven of the previous night—the sense of the “other world,” of its possible reality and nearness. There was an odor here, strong enough to his keen nostrils, of flowers, especially of violets, and of the last end of mortal man, a blend of sweet and abhorrent which was to infect his mind for many a day. However, he did not hesitate, but, with slower steps, that made hardly a sound, turned a corner of the path, cleared a clump of trees which had blocked his view, and now saw the grave of Gwendoline, the cross, the chaplet of fresh violets at the foot of the cross, and over the cross a woman weeping.

Weeping bitterly, her face in her hands, she was standing, but her body was bent in grief, and she was all shaken with it, though little sound escaped that lonely passion of pity and heartbreak. Harcourt at once felt that he had invaded holy ground. He gave himself time to notice only that she was tall, cloaked wholly in black—and he turned, or half-turned, to retire.

But in his haste and embarrassment he let his stick fall from his hand; whereat the young woman started, and they looked at each other.

In an instant Harcourt understood that she was the sister of her whose portrait stood on his mantelpiece; and he felt that he had never seen woman so lovely and gentle.

CHAPTER III

VIOLET

She looked at Harcourt with wide eyes, seeming frightened, in suspense, and ready to fly, because he did not know how his eyes devoured her.

“I am sorry—” he began, retiring a step.

“What do you want of me?” she asked, staring fixedly at him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t be alarmed; I am merely here by chance.”

“But why have you followed me?”

“No, I have not followed you, I assure you of that. I did not know that you were here, even. I beg you not to be alarmed—”

“Why, then, are you here?” she persisted.

“This is a public cemetery, you know. I came to see a grave, just as you have—”

“This grave?”

“How can you possibly guess that,” he asked, “since you have never before seen me, and do not know who I am?”

“You stopped here, did you not?” she asked. “You stopped, and looked strangely at me.”

“Certainly I looked at you,” admitted Harcourt. “I did not realize that I looked ‘strangely.’ However, let me be frank. I did come to see your sister’s grave.”

“My sister!” said she, shrinking, as from the touch of a wound, “how do you know? what interest can you have strong enough to bring you?”

“Not such a very strong interest,” he answered. “I am here merely to fill an idle hour, and because I happen to be occupying the flat in which your sister died. There is that link between her and me; she has moved in the same little home, looked from the same windows, slept in the same room, as I, poor girl.”

She suddenly looked up from the ground, saying: “May I ask how long you have been there?”

“This is only the second day,” he answered with a reassuring smile.

“Your interest in her has been sudden.”

“But her crayon portrait is there over my dining-room mantelpiece, and it is an interesting one. The moment I saw you I understood that you are her sister.”

“You must have known that she had a sister.”

“Why, yes, I knew.”

“Who told you that, pray?”

Her manner had now changed from one of alarm to one of resentment, of mistrust. Her questions leaped from her as from a judge eager to condemn.

“Surely it was no secret that she had a sister,” he said. “The agent happened to mention it in speaking to me of the late tenant, as agents do.”

“Ah, no doubt,” she said half to herself. “You all are ready enough with explanations. Wise as serpents, if not harmless as doves.”

The last words were spoken with a break in her voice and a look that went to Harcourt’s heart. He understood that he was in the presence here of the strange, of a mind touched to wildness by a monstrous grief, and needing delicate handling.

“What I have told you is only the truth,” he said gently.

“Ah, no doubt,” she said again. “But did you know the history of the flat before you went into it?”

“Why, yes.”

“Yet you went. What, then, was your motive?”

“Ah, now, come,” said he. “I can see that you are on a wrong track, and I must try to set things right. Your sister has perhaps been badly treated by some one or more persons, and the notion has occurred to you that I may be one of them, or may have some knowledge even of one of them. But I have been in England only a month; I come from Wyoming, a place at the other end of creation. See if you can’t catch a hint of an accent in my speech. I never saw your sister alive; I am quite a stranger in London. It is not nice to be mistrusted.”

She thought this over gravely, then said with a moment’s openness of heart: “Forgive me, if I give you pain unjustly”; but at once again she changed, muttering stubbornly to herself with a certain vindictiveness: “If I mistrust you, it is not for nothing. I suppose you are all about equally pitiless and deadly. There she lies, low enough, dead, undone—so young—Gwen! was there no pity, no help, not even God to direct, not even God?”

Again she covered her face, and was shaken with grief, while Harcourt, yearning, but not daring to stir a step toward her, stood in pain; till presently she looked up at him sharply with all the former suspiciousness, saying with here a sob and there a sob: “But, after all, words are only words. You can all talk, I dare say; yet you have not been able to give me any valid explanation.”

“Of what?” he asked.

“Of your strange interest in this lady; of your presence here over her grave; of the fact that you chose to occupy the flat, knowing what you know of it. In my mind these are points against you.”

He could not help smiling. “Let me reason with you,” said he earnestly. “Remember that I am not the first person who has occupied the flat since the death of your sister. Did not a Miss L’Estrange have it before me? Well, my motive is precisely the same as hers—I wanted somewhere to live. You did not attribute to Miss L’Estrange any ulterior motive, I think? Then why attribute one to me?”

“I attribute nothing to any one,” she sighed. “I merely ask for an explanation which you seem unable to give.”

“Think, now! Have I not given it? I say that I wanted a flat and took this one. Don’t mistrust me for nothing!”

“Oh, I keep a perfectly open mind. Till things are proved to me, I mistrust no one. But you make your excuses with rather too much earnestness to be convincing; for you would not care what I thought, if you had no motive.”

“My motive is simply a desire to stand well with you,” said David. “You won’t punish me for that?”

Now for the first time she looked squarely at him, her eyes meditating gravely upon his face, as she said: “If you never knew my sister before, it was good of you to come to her grave. You do not look like one of the ruthless ones.”

“No, I hope not. Thank you for saying that,” said David, with his eyes on the ground. He was shy with women. Such a girl as this filled a shrine in his presence.

“And yet, who can ever tell?” she sighed, half to herself, with a weary drop of the hand. “The world seems so hopelessly given over to I don’t know what. One would say that men were compounded of fraud and ill-will, so that one does not know whom to trust, nor even if there is any one to be trusted. You go into the flat without any motive apparently that you can give. You would never have managed it, if I had had my way!”

“Is it against your will that the flat has been let?” asked David.

“That is not your business, you know!” she said, quickly resentful of probing questions.

“I only asked,” said he, “in order to tell you that if it was against your will, you have only to breathe a wish, and I shall find the means to leave it.”

“Well, surely that is kindly said,” she answered. “Forgive me, will you, if I seem unreasonable? Perhaps you do not know what grief is. I will tell you that it is against my will that the flat has been let. My mother’s doing; she insisted because she suspected that I had a tendency to—be drawn toward the spot; she feared that I might—go there; and so it was let. But it is useless, I suppose, for you to give it up. They would only let it to some one else. And whoever was in it, I should have the same suspicions—”

That word! “Suspicions of what?” asked David. “I am so much in the dark as to what you mean! If you would explain yourself, then I might be able to help you. Will you let me help you?”

“God knows what the truth is,” she said despondently, staring downward afresh, for, when David looked at her, her eyes fell. “They are all kind enough at first, no doubt, and their kindness ends here, where the grass grows, and the winds moan all night, Gwen. I do not know who or what you are, sir,” she added, with that puzzling sharpness, “or what your motive may be; but—what have you done with my sister’s papers?”

“Papers?” said David. “You surprise me. Are there any papers of your sister’s in the flat?”

She looked keenly at him, with eyelids lowered, seeking to read his mind as though it was an open book.

“Who knows?” said she.

He recalled his harmless conversational dodge with Dibbin. He could have smiled at the thought; but he only answered: “Surely all her papers have been removed?”

“Who knows?” she said again, eying him keenly.

“Certainly, I have seen no papers!” he exclaimed.

“Well, you seem honest.”

“I hope so.”

“If you did happen to find any papers in the flat, they would not be your property, would they?”

“Of course not!”

“What would you do with them?”

“I should give them to you.”

“God grant that you are honest!” she sighed. “But how would you find me?”

“If you give me your name and address—”

“My name is Violet Mordaunt,” she said rapidly, as if venturing against some feeling of rashness. “My home is at Rigsworth in Warwickshire, near Kenilworth; but I am for the present in London, at—”

Before she could mention her London address they were both aware that a third person was with them. The light carpet of snow would not have deadened the newcomer’s approach to David’s ears, were it not that he was so absorbed in the words, the looks, the merest gestures of his companion. David heard the girl say; “Oh, Mr. Van Hupfeldt!” and a man walked past him to the grave with lifted hat. The man and Violet Mordaunt shook hands. It was now getting dark; but David could still see that the newcomer was an uncommonly handsome person, turned out with faultless elegance from his glossy beaver to the tip of his verni boots; of dark, sallow skin; and a black mustache as daintily curled as those mustaches which one sees in the costumers’ windows. David stepped back a little, and stood awkwardly. Beside this West End dandy he felt that he was somewhat of a rough-rider, and, like most young men dowered with both brain and sinew, he fancied that women incline more readily to the trimly dressed popinjay of society. Yet Violet Mordaunt seemed anything but pleased at the interruption.

“I am come to look for you by the request of your mother,” David heard the stranger say. “It was feared that you might be here, and I am to take you home, if you will do me the honor to come in my carriage.”

“But I ought not to be tracked,” said Violet, with the quick petulance which already was music for David.

“There is the question of tea and dinner,” remarked Van Hupfeldt. “If a lady will not eat, she must expect to be plagued.”

“I prefer to walk home.”

“That couldn’t be done; it is too far,” said Van Hupfeldt. “Oh, come, come!” he went on pleadingly, with a fond gaze into her eyes.

A minute afterward they left the grave together. Van Hupfeldt, as he passed David on the path, frowned momentarily; Violet slightly inclined her head.

He looked after them, and admitted to himself that they made a handsome pair, tall, like children of the gods. But three yards away after they had passed him something fell from Violet—a card—whether by accident or design David did not know; but the thought that it might be by design sent a thrill through his frame. He picked it up. It had on it the address of a boarding-house in Porchester Gardens.

He was yet tingling with the hope of meeting her again when a custodian approached. “Must shut the gates, sir,” he said.

And the clang of iron brought David back to the roadway and reality once more.

CHAPTER IV

“JOHANN STRAUSS”

On Monday morning David made the acquaintance of the genus “housekeeper,” when the woman recommended by Dibbin arrived to take him in hand. He had thought that she would sleep in the place, and had rather looked forward to the human companionship, for nothing is more cut off from the world of the living than a flat, if one is alone in it, especially through the watches of the night. Surely, if there are ghosts in want of undisturbed house-room, every bachelor’s flat must be haunted.

Mrs. Grover, the housekeeper, however, said that “sleeping in” was not the arrangement suggested to her by Dibbin, since there were “the children to be looked after.” David, for his part, would not let it appear that he cared at all; so Mrs. Grover, a busy little fat woman, set to work making things rattle, on an understanding of “sleeping out” and freedom for church services o’ Sunday.

This Monday was David’s appointed day for beginning work. But he did not prosper very well. Plenty of paper, lots of ink, and a new gold pen make no Shakespeare. And it is always hard to begin, even when the mind does not wander. But Violet Mordaunt had brown eyes, so soft, so grave, as those that beam with pity over the dying. She was more beautiful than her sister, whose face, too, David could see through the back of his head. Also, Van Hupfeldt was undoubtedly a more elegant object for the eye of woman to rest upon than David Harcourt.

David wondered if Van Hupfeldt was engaged to Violet. He had certainly spoken to her at the grave with much tender gallantry of manner, as if something was understood between them. And since Violet’s mother sent this man to seek her in his carriage, that must mean that they were on familiar terms; unless, indeed, the mother was pressingly anxious about Violet, could not go herself, and had no one else to win the young woman home from her sister’s grave. Such questionings were the cause of long pauses between the writing of David’s sentences. He was glad when something interrupted—when the bell rang, and Dibbin was ushered in.

“I have looked in for one minute on the subject of that—grate,” said the agent. “Do not disturb yourself, I beg. Well, I see that Mrs. Grover is duly in her place, and you as snug here as a bird in its nest.”

“So snug,” said David, “that I feel stifled. It beats me how people can get so accustomed to this sort of prison as not even to remember any longer that they are in prison. No air, no room to stretch, coal-dust in your very soul, and even at night in your bed!”

“Dash it all, don’t say it.”

“Say what?”

“Were you about to refer to any fresh experiences?”

“Of the ghost? Not a bit of it!” said David. “I have seen, heard, or smelled nothing more of anything.”

“Good, good!” went on Dibbin, softly. “Keep on like that, and we shall pull through yet. I find you are well stocked with violets, meantime.”

David laughed a little uneasily, and said “Yes”—no more. Whiffs of violets in a lonely flat, for which one can’t account, are not altogether pleasant things. David had therefore surrounded himself with violets, in order, when he was greeted with a scent of violets, to be able to say to himself that the scent came from those which he had bought. He had not admitted even to himself what his motive was in buying; nor would he admit it to Mr. Dibbin. There, however, the violets were in several pots, and their fragrance at once drew the notice of a visitor, for the London florist has an art to heighten dull nature in violets and much else.

“Have a seat, Mr. Dibbin,” said David, “and let us talk.”

“I am afraid I must be off,” began the other.

“Well, have a B. and S. any way. I only want to hear from you whatever you can tell me of Mrs. and Miss Violet Mordaunt.”

“What? You have discovered their names?” cried Dibbin with a start.

“I have.”

“Mr. Harcourt, you are a remarkable man,” said the agent with quiet certainty.

“Oh, not too remarkable. But since I do know something, you might let yourself loose as to the rest, as I am interested. You have seen the mother, I know. Have you seen the daughter, too?”

“Several times.”

“Pretty girl, eh? Or what do you think?”

“Well, I am getting an old man now,” said Dibbin; “but I have been young, and I think I can remember how I should have felt at twenty-five in the presence of such a being.”

“Pretty, you think her, eh?”

“Rather!”

“Prettier than Gwendoline? Prettier than her sister?”

“Well, I don’t know so much about that neither—different type—graver, softer in the eye and hair, taller, darker, not so young; but that poor dead girl was something to make the mouth water, too, sir—such a cut diamond! to see her in her full war-paint, turned out like a daisy!—in short, lovely beings, both of ’em, both of ’em.”

“Fairly well fixed, the mother?”

“You mean financially? Oh, I think so. Got a fine place down in Warwickshire, I know—not far from Kenilworth. Good old family, and that sort of thing.”

“But how on earth this man Strauss, more or less an adventurer, I take it, could have got hold of such a girl, to the extent of drawing her from her happy home, and sending her on the stage. He didn’t marry her, Dibbin? He didn’t marry her?”

“How can I say?” asked Dibbin, blinking. “We can all make a shrewd guess; but one can’t be absolutely certain, though the fact of her suicide would seem to be a sort of proof.”

“What do the mother and Miss Mordaunt think of it? Do they assume that she was married? Or do they know enough of the world to guess that she was not? I suppose you don’t know.”

“They know what the world thinks, I’m afraid,” answered Dibbin. “I am sure of that much. Yes, they know, they know. I have been with Mrs. Mordaunt a good many times, for one reason or another. I can tell how she feels, and I’m afraid that she not only guesses what the world thinks, but agrees with the world’s view. On the other hand, I have reason to think that Miss Mordaunt has an obstinate faith in her sister, and neither believes that she died unmarried, nor even that she committed suicide. Well, well, you can’t expect much clear reasoning from a poor sister with a head half turned with grief.”

Dibbin tossed off his brandy, while David paced the room, his hands behind him, with a clouded brow.

“Have they no protector, these women?” he asked. “Isn’t Miss Mordaunt engaged?”

“I fancy not,” said the agent. “In fact, I think I can say undoubtedly not. She was not engaged before the death of her sister, I am certain; and this disaster of her sister appears to have inspired the poor girl with such a detestation of the whole male sex—”

“Do you happen to know who a certain Mr. Van Hupfeldt is?” asked David.

“Van Hupfeldt, Van Hupfeldt? No, never heard of him. What of him?”

“He seems to be a pretty close friend of the Mordaunts, if I am right.”

“He may be a close friend, and yet a new one,” said Dibbin, “as sometimes happens. Never heard of him, although I thought that I knew the names of most of Mrs. Mordaunt’s connections, either through herself or her solicitors.”

“But to go back to this Strauss,” said David. “Do you mean to say that neither the mother nor Miss Mordaunt ever once saw him?”

“Not once that they know of.”

“Then, how did he get hold of Gwendoline?”

“That’s the question. It is suspected that he met her in the hunting-field, persuaded her to meet him secretly, and finally won her to fly from home. To me this is quite credible; for I’ve seen Johann Strauss twice, and each time have been struck with the thought how fascinating this man must be in the eyes of a young woman!”

“What was he like, then, this Mr. Johann Strauss of the flourishy signature?”

“A most handsome young man,” said Mr. Dibbin, impressively; “hard to describe exactly. Came from the States, I think, or had lived there—had just a touch of the talk, perhaps—of Dutch extraction, I take it. Handsome fellow, handsome fellow; the kind of man girls throw themselves over precipices after: teeth flashing between the wings of his black mustache—tall, thin man, always most elegantly dressed—dark skin—sallow—”

At that word “sallow,” David started, the description of Johann Strauss had so strangely reminded him of Van Hupfeldt! But the thought that the cause of the one sister’s undoing should be friendly with the other sister, paying his court to her over the grave of the ill-fated dead, was too wild to find for itself a place all at once in the mind.

David frowned down the notion of such a horror. He told himself that it was dark when he had seen Van Hupfeldt, that there were many tall men with white teeth and black mustaches, and sallow, dark skins. If he had felt some sort of antipathy to Van Hupfeldt at first sight, this was no proof of evil in Van Hupfeldt’s nature, but a proof only, perhaps, of David’s capabilities of being jealous of one more favored than himself by nature as he fancied—and by Violet Mordaunt, which was the notion that rankled.

And yet he tingled. Dibbin had said that this Van Hupfeldt might be “a new friend—one who had become a friend since the death of Gwendoline.”

David paced the room with slow steps, and while Dibbin talked on of one or another of the people who had known Gwendoline Mordaunt in the flesh, vowed to himself that he would take this matter on his shoulders and see it through.

“Speaking of the Miss L’Estrange who was in the flat before me,” said he; “how long did she stay in it?”

“Three months, nearly,” answered Dibbin, “and then all of a sudden she wouldn’t stay another day. And I had no means of forcing her to do so either.”

“What? Did the ghost suddenly get worse?”

“I couldn’t quite tell you what happened. Miss Ermyn L’Estrange isn’t a lady altogether easy to understand when in an excited condition. Suffice it to say, she wouldn’t stay another hour, and went off with a noise like a catherine-wheel.”

“Quite so. But I say, Dibbin, can you give me the address of the lady?”

“With pleasure,” said the agent, in whom brandy and soda acted as a solvent. “I am a man, Mr. Harcourt, with three hundred and odd addresses in my head, I do assure you. But, then, Miss L’Estrange is a bird of passage—”

“All right, just write down the address that you know; and there is one other address that I want, Mr. Dibbin—that of the girl who acted as help to Miss Gwendoline Mordaunt.”

Dibbin had known this address also, and with the promise to see if he could find it among his papers—for it was he who had recommended the girl—went away. He was hardly gone when Harcourt, who did not let the grass grow under his feet, put on hat and coat, and started out to call upon Miss Ermyn L’Estrange.

CHAPTER V

VON OR VAN?

The address of Miss L’Estrange, given to David by Dibbin, was in King’s Road, Chelsea, and thither David set out, thinking in his cab of that word “papers,” of the oddness of Violet’s question at the grave: “What have you done with my sister’s papers?”

Whatever papers might be meant, it was hardly to be supposed that Miss L’Estrange knew aught of them, yet he hoped for information from her, since a tenant next in order is always likely to have gathered many bits of knowledge about the former tenant.

As for his right to pry and interfere, that, he assured himself, was a settled thing. Going over in his mind Violet’s words and manner in the cemetery, he came to the conclusion that she was half inclined to suspect that he was her sister’s destroyer, who had now taken the flat for some vaguely evil reason, perhaps to seek, or to guard from her, those very papers for which she so craved. Had she never heard, he wondered, that her sister’s evil mate was a man with a black mustache and pale, dark skin? Perhaps, if she ever had, she would suspect—some one else than he! That would be strange enough, her suspicion of the innocent, if at the same time the guilty was at her side, unsuspected! But David tried to banish from his mind the notion that Van Hupfeldt might possibly be Johann Strauss.

At Chelsea he was admitted to a flat as cozily dim as his own, but much more frivolously crowded with knickknacks; nor had he long to wait until Miss L’Estrange, all hair and paint, dashed in. It was near one in the afternoon, but she had an early-morning look of rawness and déshabillement, as if she had just risen from bed. Her toilet was incomplete. Her face had the crude look of a water-color daub by a school-girl; her whirl of red hair swept like a turban about her head.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I am sorry—” began David.

“Cut the excuses,” said Miss Ermyn L’Estrange. She had a reputation for bruskness which passed for wit in her set.

“I am the occupant of the flat in Eddystone Mansions which you recently left.”

“I hope you like it.”

“I like it fairly well, as a flat.”

“What? Not seen anything?”

“No. Anything of what nature?”

“Anything ghostified?” she snapped, sitting with her chin on her palm, her face poked forward close to David’s, while the sleeve fell away from her thin forearm. She had decided that he was an interesting young man.

“I have seen no ghost,” he said. “I don’t believe I ever shall see one.”

“There are ghosts,” she said; “so it’s no good saying there are not, for my old Granny Price has been chased by one, and there’s been a ghost in that very flat. My servant Jenny saw it with her own eyes.”

“It is always some one else’s eyes which see the invisible,” said David.

“Jenny’s eyes are not some one else’s, they are her own. She saw it, I tell you, but perhaps you are one of those people who cower under the sheets all night for fright, and in the daytime swear that there are no ghosts.”

“What? You know so much of me already?”

“Oh, I know my man the moment I lay eyes on him, as a rule. You’re from Australia—I can tell your twang—and you have come to England to look for a wife. Can’t very well get along without us, after all, can you?”

“There is some truth in that. What a pity you didn’t see the ghost yourself!”

“I heard it; I smelled it.”

“Really? What did it smell of? Brimstone?”

“Violets!”

David started, not wholly because he thought Miss L’Estrange would be flattered by this tribute to her forcible style.

“And I’m not one of your fanciful ones either,” she went on, smirking at the effect she had made.

“How often did this thing happen to you?”

“Twice in three months.”

“Daytime? Night-time?”

“Dead of night. The first time about two in the morning, the second time about three.”

“To me this is naturally fascinating,” said David. “Do tell me—”

“The first time, I was asleep in that front bed-room, when I suddenly found myself awake—couldn’t tell why, for I hadn’t long been in bed, and was tired. I found myself listening, heard some creaks about, nothing more than you can generally hear in a house in the dead of night, and I was thinking of going to sleep again, when all at once I seemed to scent violets somewhere. I wasn’t certain at first, but the notion grew, and if it had been brimstone, as you said, I couldn’t have been so overcome as I was—something so solemn and deathly in that fume of violets visiting anybody in the dark in that fashion. As I knew that Gwen Barnes, who poisoned herself in that very room, was fond of violets—for I had seen her both on and off the stage several times—you can guess whether I felt rummy or not. Pop went my little head under the bed-clothes, for I’ll stand up to any living girl you care to mention, and send her home all the worse for it; but the dead have an unfair advantage, anyhow. The next minute I heard a bang—it sounded to me like the lid of one of my trunks dropping down—and this was followed by a scream. The scream did for me—I was upset for weeks. It was Jenny who had screamed; but, like a fool, I thought it was the ghost—I don’t know what I thought; in fact, I just heard the scream, and lay me down and d’eed. When I came to myself, there was Jenny shivering at my side, with the light turned on, saying that a tall woman had been in the flat—”

“Was Gwendoline Barnes in the flesh a tall girl?” asked David.

“Pretty tall; one would have called her tall.”

“And Jenny was certain? She had really seen a woman?”

“Quite certain.”

“In the light?”

“No, in the dark.”

“Ah, that’s not so good. And as to your trunk, had you left it locked?”

“No, I don’t think. It’s certain anyway that something or somebody was at it that night; for next day I found the things rummaged.”

“Sure now? I don’t imagine that you are very tidy.”

“The cheek! I tell you the things were rummaged.”

“And nothing stolen?”

“Ghosts are not thieves. They only come back to pretend to themselves that they are still living in the old scenes, and that their bit of a fling is not all over forever. I can well imagine how the poor things feel, can’t you? Of course, nothing was stolen, though I did miss something out of the trunk a day or two afterward—”

“What was that?”

“My agreement with the theater. Couldn’t find it high or low in the place; though I was pretty sure that I had put it into that very trunk. Three weeks after it had disappeared, lo and behold! my agreement comes to me one morning through the post! No letter with it, not a word of explanation, just the blessed agreement of itself staring me in the face, like a miracle. Now, I’m rather off miracles—aren’t you? So I said to myself—”

“But stay, what was the postmark on the envelope which brought you back this agreement?” asked David.

“Just London, and a six-barred gate.”

“You couldn’t perhaps find that envelope now?”

“Now, do I look like anybody who ties up old envelopes in packets? Or do you take me for an old maid? Because, if you do, just let me know.”

“Certainly not an old one,” said David. “But how as to the second visit of the ghost?”

“The second time it was about three in the morning. Jenny did not see her then; but we both woke up at the same moment without any apparent cause—we were sleeping together, you may bet your last dollar on that!—and we both smelled something like violets, and we heard a sound, too, like the top of the piano being shut down. ‘Miss L’Estrange,’ Jenny whispered into my ear, ‘there’s something in the drawing-room.’—‘Go, Jenny,’ I whispered to her, ‘and see what it is.’—‘You go, Miss L’Estrange,’ Jenny whispered to me, ‘you being the mistress; and I’ll come after.’—‘But you are the servant,’ I whispered to her, ‘you go.’—‘No, Miss L’Estrange,’ she whispered back, ‘you are braver than me, you go, and I’ll come after.’—‘No, you know that you are much the bravest, Jenny, so don’t be such a coward,’ I whispered to her, ‘and I’ll come after.’ It was like a farcical comedy. At this we heard something like a chair falling upon the carpet in the drawing-room, and now we were in such a state of fright that we couldn’t move our hands, to say nothing of our feet. Then a long time passed, we didn’t hear anything more; so, after about half an hour of it, Jenny and I together made a rush for the switch, and got out into the drawing-room. Then again we scented a faint something like violets; but nobody was there, and we neither saw nor heard anything more.”

“So, after that second experience, I suppose, you would stay no longer in the flat?” said David.

“I did stay a few days. It wasn’t altogether the ghost that drove me away, though that may have had something to do with it, but the cheek and the meanness of the man who put me there.”

“Of the—Ah, I beg pardon,” said David, with lowered lids.

“Oh, this isn’t a Sunday school. If you hem and haw at me I shall show you the short cut to the front door. It was a fair business arrangement; so don’t you think anything else. The man was named Strauss, and whether his motive in putting me there was quite square or not, don’t let him suppose that I am going to screen him, for I’m not. I am straight with those that are straight with me; but those that are up to mean tricks, let them beware of the color of my hair—”

“So you were put into the flat!”

“Didn’t I go into it rent-free? Stop, I will tell you, and you shall judge for yourself whether I have been shabbily used or not. One night last August I was introduced by a friend to a gentleman named Strauss—dark, pale man, pretty fetching, but not my style. However, next day he turned up at my place—I was living then in Great Titchfield-St.; and what do you think my man wanted? To put me into the Eddystone Mansions flat for six months at his expense, on the condition that I or Jenny would devote some time every day to searching for papers among the furniture. He said that a chum of his had once occupied the flat, and had left in it one or more documents, carefully hidden somewhere, which were of the utmost importance; I was to search for these, and give them to him. Well, I didn’t half like it, for I thought he was wicked. So I asked him why he didn’t take the flat, and search for the papers himself at his leisure? Well, he made some excuse or other, and at last, as he talked sanely enough, I struck hands over it—rent free, six months, an hour’s search each day; and Jenny and I moved in.”

“Did you search an hour each day?” asked David with a laugh.

“Hardly likely!” grinned Miss Ermyn L’Estrange. “I can see myself searching a small flat day after day for I didn’t know what, like a goose. There was nowhere to search. I did look about a little the first day; but, not finding any documents, I thought to myself, ‘Here endeth.’ Of course, I had to tell him that I was busy searching, for that man pestered me so, you wouldn’t believe. He never actually came to the flat, for some reason or other; but night after night, when the theaters opened in September, there he was, wanting to know if I had found anything, if I had probed the cushions with hat-pins, if I had looked under the carpets, and the rest of it. At last I began to treat him a bit off-handedly, I admit, and before the third month was up, he says to me one night that if I didn’t find something at once, he would have to cut off the allowance for the rent. I told him that he had put me there for six months, that I had made all arrangements, and that he was an idiot. If he didn’t know his mind, I knew mine. Oh, we had a fine set-to, I can tell you. He said that, since I had proved useless to him, I should have to pay my own rent, so, what with ghosts and all, I wouldn’t stay in the place another two days; and in going I gave it hot to that Mr. Dibbin, too—”

“What had Dibbin done?” asked David.

“He hadn’t done anything; but still I gave him a piece of my mind, for I was wild.”

“Poor Dibbin! he is still shaky from it. He has mentioned to me that you went off with a noise like a catherine-wheel. But you never found any papers at all in the flat?”

“No—except one, or rather two, and those Strauss never got.”

“How was that?”

“Because I didn’t find them till the day after we had had the row, when my trunks were ready packed to go, and I wasn’t going to give them to him then, for his cheek. Besides, they didn’t concern him; they were only a marriage certificate, and the certificate of a birth which fell out of a picture.”

David sat up, saying: “How do you mean, ‘fell out of a picture’?”

“As we were carrying out the trunks, there was a bump, and one of the pictures in the corridor came down. The boards at the back of it must have been loose, for they fell out, and among them was an envelope with the two certificates in it.”

“Now, I bless my stars that ever I came to you,” said David. “This may be the very thing I want.”

“How many of you are after papers in that flat, I should like to know. First there was Strauss, then that young lady, and now you—”

“Which young lady?” asked David.

“Why, I hadn’t been in the flat three days when a young lady, a tall, dark girl came, and practically insulted me. She wanted to know what was my motive for coming into the flat, and if I was the agent of any one, and if I meant to purloin any papers which I might find. Well, I’m not one for taking much sauce from another woman; for I’ve got red hair, as you can see for yourself, but somehow I couldn’t be hard on her, she had had some big trouble, I could tell—a bit touched somewhere, too, I thought, suspicious as a bird, sick at the very name of Strauss! She had dropped to it all right that I was there to serve Strauss’s ends, and she went on her bended knees to me, asking me not to do it. I couldn’t quite make out what it was all about, or what there was between her and Strauss, for she wouldn’t tell me. It was something pretty strong, for when I told Strauss about her visit, I thought the man was going to drop dead. Her name was Violet Mordaunt. I remember it; for Mordaunt was also the family name of the woman in the marriage certificate—”

“Why did you not send this marriage certificate to Violet Mordaunt?” asked David, “since you did not give it to Strauss?”

“I would have sent it to her, I’m sure, but I didn’t have her address. She did leave me an address that day she came; but, to tell the truth, I didn’t take the whole to-do about papers, papers, papers, seriously, and Lord knows what became of the address—”

“Oh, good heavens, how selfish and careless!” groaned David.

“Look here, young man, you come from Australia?” cried Miss L’Estrange, bouncing up from her chair. “In London people look after themselves and mind their own business, you see. We are as kind-hearted here as they are anywhere else, but we haven’t the same leisure to be kind. I tell you that if I had had the young lady’s address I should very likely have sent her the papers; but I didn’t, and that’s all; so don’t preach.”

“Well, better late than never,” said David. “Just give me the papers now, if you will, for I know her address—”

“But where are the papers?” said Miss L’Estrange. “You don’t suppose that I keep papers—”

“Don’t say that you have lost them!” pleaded David.

“I haven’t the faintest idea where the papers are! I was in a regular flurry, just moving out of the place; I had no interest in the papers. I glanced at them to see what they were, and, as far as I can remember, I threw them on the floor, or handed them to Jenny. It’s just possible that they are here now; but I shouldn’t fancy so. I’ll ask Jenny when she comes in.”

“Ah, you little know how much misery you might have saved a poor girl, if you had been a little more thoughtful,” growled David, and his wrath seemed to cow the woman somewhat. “This name of Mordaunt was the maiden name of your predecessor in the flat, who took the name of Gwendoline Barnes; Violet Mordaunt is her sister; Gwendoline is believed by all the world, including her own mother, to have been led astray, and the certificates which you handled so lightly would have cleared her name and lifted a world of grief from her poor sister’s heart.”

“Good Lord! How was I to know all that?” shrilled Miss L’Estrange, staring. “So it was Strauss that ruined Gwen Barnes? And this Violet Mordaunt was Gwen Barnes’s sister? Now you say it, they were something alike. I always put down that Strauss for a rotter—”

“But why, since he married her?”

“Married whom? Strauss wasn’t the husband’s name on the marriage-certificate! Gwendoline Mordaunt was one, and the other, as far as I can recollect, was a foreign name, von Somebody or other—”

“Von!” David also sprang to his feet. “Are you sure? or might it have been ‘van’? Oh, try now to remember! One is German, the other Dutch!”

“It might have been ‘van,’ or it might have been ‘von’—you can’t expect one to remember after all these names. But I remember the woman’s name, Gwendoline Mordaunt, quite well, because the Gwendoline reminded me of Gwen Barnes, and the Mordaunt reminded me of Miss Violet Mordaunt; and the husband’s name, I know, was von or van Something, and so was the name of the child—a boy it was—I think its name was Henry—”

“Hupfeldt?” suggested David, suddenly.

“Hupfeldt? It might have been Hupfeldt. I really can’t say now. I’ll ask Jenny.”

“At any rate,” said David, calming himself with a great effort, “we have that certain fact that Gwendoline Mordaunt was a wife. Good, to begin; most excellent, to begin. You can’t say where the marriage took place? No other information at all.”

“I’m sorry, since it is so mighty important, but I’m afraid not. However, I’ll do my best for you. I’ll see if I or Jenny can remember anything. When we left the flat, there was a great overflowing with my torn-up letters, and Jenny may have thrown the certificates on that grate, or the bits of them, or she may have dropped them on the floor, or, just possibly, she put them in her pocket and may have them still. She will be here in less than half an hour, so, if I may offer you a cigar, and a whisky and soda—”

“You are very good. I won’t stay now, as I am in a hurry to do something. But, if I may come back—may I?”

“Modest request! As often as you please, and welcome. This is Liberty Hall, you know.”

“Thank you, I will, then. There is one thing I have to ask you. Could you point out to me Mr. Johann Strauss?”

“Of course, if I saw him. But I never knew where he lived, and have never seen him since the day I left the flat.”

“Well, that may come in time,” said David, putting out his hand; “and meantime you will do your best for me in finding out about the two certificates. Thank you for all your goodness, and I will be here again soon.”

“Good-by,” said Miss L’Estrange, “and I do hope you mean to give that Strauss a sound hiding some day. You look as if you could do it with one hand and pick your teeth with the other. It would be no more than he deserves.”

David ran down the flight after flight of stairs quicker than he had gone up.

“Now,” he thought to himself as he left the building with eager steps, “is my chance to give some joy!” Going into the first paper-shop, he wrote: “A well-wisher of Miss Mordaunt desires to assure her that it is a pretty certain thing that her sister Gwendoline was a duly wedded wife; the proofs of this statement may sooner or later be forthcoming.”

He put no signature to it, made haste to post it, and drove back to Eddystone Mansions. It had been wiser had he flattered Miss Ermyn L’Estrange by returning to her.

CHAPTER VI

THE WORD OF JOY

Not many guests were for the moment at No. 60A, Porchester Gardens, so that the Mordaunts, mother and daughter, who always stopped there during their visits to London, could almost persuade themselves that they were in their own home. In the good old days Mr. and Mrs. Harrod, the proprietors, had been accustomed to receive three Mordaunts to their hospitality, when Gwen, the bright and petted, came with Violet and Mrs. Mordaunt. Only two now visited London, a grayer mother, a dumber sister; and though the Harrods asked no questions, made no prying into the heart’s secret, nor uttered any word of sympathy, they well divined that the feet of the angel of sorrow had passed that way, and expressed their pity silently by a hundred little ministries.

Violet and Mrs. Mordaunt were having tea in the drawing-room on the day of David Harcourt’s visit to Miss L’Estrange, when the postman’s knock sounded, and a minute later Mrs. Harrod herself came in, saying:

“A letter for Miss Violet, and it contains good news; for I dreamt of soldiers last night, and so sure as I dream of soldiers, so sure are there letters with good news.”

“The good news will all be in the other people’s letters, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “Good news is like wealth, Mrs. Harrod, unequally divided; to some of us it never comes.”

“Oh, come now!” cried the hearty Mrs. Harrod. “Never say die, say I! There’s good and bad in store for everybody; and care killed a cat, after all. Don’t I tell you I dreamt of soldiers? And so sure—”

“It is that good heart of yours which makes you dream of soldiers. To bring healing to some lots in this world, you would have need to dream of generals and field-marshals—”

“Some more tea, mother?” interposed Violet. She shrank from the threatened talk of human ills. Mrs. Mordaunt, most excellent woman, was not adverse to pouring some of her grief into a sympathetic ear.

“Well, you will tell me at dinner whether I was right,” cried Mrs. Harrod, and was gone.

She had placed the letter on the tray, and there it still lay unopened. Violet handed the tea to her mother. The room was empty, save for them, the few other guests being out, and in the house reigned perfect quietude, a peacefulness accentuated by the wheels and hoofs passing in the dusk outside.

“Vi,” said Mrs. Mordaunt, “those flowers at your waist are almost faded; I think you might give up violets in London. They don’t seem to me the same thing as in the country; but at least let them be fresh. Mr. Van Hupfeldt will be here presently—”

“How do you know, mother?”

“He mentioned, dear, that he would be coming.”

“But why, after all, every day?”

“Is that displeasing to you, dear?”

“It seems superfluous.”

“That compels me to suggest to you, Vi, that his coming to-day is of some special importance.”

“And why, pray?”

“Can you not guess?”

The girl stood up; she walked restlessly to the window and back before she cried: “Mother! mother! Have you not had experience enough of the curse of men?” Her great eyes rested gloomily on the older woman’s face. There was a beautiful heredity marked in the pair; but seldom have more diverse souls been pent within similar tabernacles.

“Don’t speak so recklessly, dear,” said the old lady. “You had the best of fathers. There are good men, too, in the world, and when a man is good, he is better than any woman.”

“It may be so. God knows. I hope it is so. But is Mr. Van Hupfeldt one of these fabulous beings? It has not struck me—”

“Please, Violet, don’t imagine that I desire to influence you in the slightest degree,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “I merely wish to hint to you what, in fact, you can’t be blind to, that Mr. Van Hupfeldt’s inclinations are fixed on you, and that he will probably give expression to them to-day. On Saturday he approached me on the subject, beseeching me with great warmth to hold out to him hopes which, of course, I could not hold out, yet which I did not feel authorized wholly to destroy. At any rate, I was persuaded upon to promise him a fair field for his enterprise to-day.”

“Oh, mother! Really, this is irritating of you!” cried Violet, letting fall with a clatter a spoon she had lifted off the table.

“But I don’t see it. Why so?”

“It sounds so light-minded, at your years!”

“As if I was one of the two parties concerned!” laughed Mrs. Mordaunt with a certain maternal complacency. She knew, or thought she knew, her wayward daughter. With a little tact this most suitable marriage could be arranged.

“No,” admitted Violet, angry at the weakness of her defense, “but you allow yourself to be drawn into having a hand in what is called a love-affair because it is an event; and it was not fair to Mr. Van Hupfeldt, since you knew quite well beforehand what would be the result.”

“Well, well,” purred Mrs. Mordaunt good-humoredly, looking down to stroke the toy Pom on her lap, a nervous little animal which one might have wrapped in a handkerchief, “I will say no more. If the thought of allowing myself to be bereft of you has occurred to me, you understand for whose good I gave it a moment’s entertainment. Marriage, of course, is a change of life, and for girls whose minds have been overshadowed by sorrow, it may not be altogether a bad thing.”

“But there is usually some selection in the matter, I think, some pretense of preference for one above others. Just marriage by itself hardly seems a goal.”

“Yes, love is good, dear—none knows better than I—but better marriage without love, than love without marriage,” muttered Mrs. Mordaunt, suddenly shaken.

“And better still life with neither, it seems to me; and best of all, the end of life, and good-by to it all, mother.”

“Vi, Vi! sh-h-h, dear!” Mrs. Mordaunt was so genuinely shocked that her daughter swung the talk back into its personal channel.

“Still, I will not see this man. Tell him when he comes that I will not see him. He has held out to me hopes which he has done nothing to fulfil.”

“What hopes, dear?”

“You may as well know: hopes as to—Gwen, then.”

“Tell me.”

“Twice he has hinted to me that he knows some one who knew the man named Strauss; that he would succeed in finding this Strauss; that all was quite, quite well; and that he did not despair of finding some trace of the whereabouts of the child. He had no right to say such things, if he had not some real grounds for believing that he would do as he hinted. It is two months ago now since he last spoke in this way down at Rigsworth, and he has not referred to it since, though he has several times been alone with me. I believe that he only said it because he fancied that whatever man held out such hopes to me would be likely to find me pliant to his wishes. I won’t see him to-day.”

“Oh, he said that, did he—that all was quite well, that he might be able to find.... But he must have meant it, since he said it.”

“I doubt now that he meant it. Who knows whether he is not in league with the enemies of her who was cast helpless to the wolves—”

“Violet, for shame to let such words escape your lips! Mr. Van Hupfeldt—a man of standing and position, presented to us by Lord Vanstone, and moving in the highest circles! Oh, beware, dear, lest sorrow warp the gentler instincts of your nature, and by the sadness of the countenance the heart be not made better! Grief is evil, then, indeed when it does not win us into a sweeter mood of charity. I fear, Vi, that you have lost something of your old amiableness since the blow.”

“Forgive me, darling!” sobbed Violet, dropping quickly by the side of her mother’s chair, with her eyes swimming. “It has gone deep, this wild wrong. Forgive, forgive! I wish to feel and do right; but I can’t. It is the fault of the iron world.”

“No, don’t cry, sweet,” murmured Mrs. Mordaunt, kissing her warmly. “It will come right. We must repress all feelings of rebellion and rancor, and pray often, and in the end your good heart will find its way back to its natural sweetness and peace. I myself too frequently give way, I’m afraid; the ways of Providence are so inscrutably hard. We must bear up, and wait, and wait, till ‘harsh grief pass in time into far music.’ As for Mr. Van Hupfeldt, there seems no reason why you should see him, if you do not wish. But you haven’t opened your letter—see if it is from Rigsworth, dear.”

Violet now rose from her mother’s side, and tore open the letter. She did not know the handwriting, and as her eyes fell on the words she started. They were these: “A well-wisher of Miss Mordaunt desires to assure her that it is a pretty certain thing that her sister Gwendoline was a duly wedded wife. The proofs of this statement may sooner or later be forthcoming.”

Mrs. Mordaunt’s observant glance, noting the changes of color and expression going on in her daughter’s face, saw that the news was really as Mrs. Harrod had dreamed. Violet’s eyes were raised in silent thanksgiving, and, without saying anything, she dropped the note on her mother’s lap. Going to one of the windows, she stood there with tremulous lips. She looked into the dim street through a mist of tears. For the moment, speech was impossible.

There was silence in the room for some minutes. Then Mrs. Mordaunt called out: “Vi, dear, come here.”

Violet ran from the window with a buoyancy of dancing in her gait. “Heaven forgive us, mother, for having wronged Gwendoline in our thoughts!” said she, with her cheek against her mother’s.

“Heaven forgive me rather,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “You, dear, have never for a moment lost faith and hope. But still, Vi—”

“Well?”

“Let me warn you, dear, against too much confidence in this note. The disappointment may be all the more terrible. Why could not the sender sign his name? Of course, we can guess from whom it comes; but does not the fact that he does not sign his name show a lack of confidence in his own statements?”

“Oh, I think not,” cried Violet, flushed with enthusiasm, “if it is from whom you think; but, who, then, do you think sent it?”

“It can only be from Mr. Van Hupfeldt, child, I take it.”

The girl was seemingly taken aback for an instant; but her thoughts bubbled forth again rapidly: “Well, his motive for not signing his name may simply be a very proper reserve, not a lack of confidence in his statements. Remember, dearest, that he is coming here to-day with a certain purpose with regard to me, and if he had signed his name, it would have set up a sort of claim to my favor as a reward for services done. Oh, now I come to think of it, I call this most generous of the man!”

“That’s splendid, that’s right,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “Your instincts always scent out nobility where any clue to it can be found. I am glad that you take it in that way. But young people are enthusiastic and prone to jump to conclusions. As we grow older we acquire a certain habit of second thoughts. In this instance, no doubt, you are right; he could have had no other motive—unless—I suppose that there is no one else from whom the note may possibly have come?”

At this question Violet stood startled a moment, panting a little, and somehow there passed like a mist through her consciousness a memory, a half-thought, of David Harcourt.

“From whom else could it have come?” she asked her mother breathlessly.

“The handwriting is not Mr. Van Hupfeldt’s,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “This is a less ornate hand, you notice.”

Violet took the note again, and knit her pretty brows over it. “No,” she said, “this is a much stronger, cleaner hand—I don’t know who else—”

“Yet, if Mr. Van Hupfeldt wished to be generous in the sense of which you spoke,” said her mother, “if it was his purpose to conceal his part in the matter, he would naturally ask some one else to write for him. And, since we can imagine no one but him—There! that, I think, is his rap at the door. Tell me now, Vi, if you will see him alone?”

“Yes, mother, I will see him.”

“Bless you for your good and grateful heart! Well, then, after a little I will go out. But, oh, pray, do nothing precipitate in an impulse of joy and mere gratitude, child! If I am bereft of my two children, I am bereft indeed. Do find happiness, my darling. That first and above all.”

At that moment Mrs. Harrod looked in, with her pleasant smile, saying: “Mr. Van Hupfeldt is here. Well, did the letter contain good news?”

“You dear!” murmured Violet, running to kiss her, “I must wear red before you, so that you may dream of soldiers every, every night!”

The steps of Van Hupfeldt were heard coming up the stairs.

CHAPTER VII

VIOLET’S CONDITIONS

Van Hupfeldt bowed himself into the drawing-room. His eyes wandering weighingly with a quick underlook which they had from the face of Violet to that of Mrs. Mordaunt, and back again to Violet. He saw what pleased him, smiles on both faces, and his brow lightened. He was a man of about forty, with a little gray in his straight hair, which, parted in the middle, inclosed the forehead in a perfect arch. He stood upon thin legs as straight as poles. His hands and feet were small. His features as regular and chiseled as a statue’s; he looked more Spanish than Dutch.

Mrs. Mordaunt received him with a pressure of the hand in which was conveyed a message of sympathy and encouragement, and Van Hupfeldt bent toward Violet with a murmur:

“I am glad to see you looking so bright to-day.”

“You observe quickly,” said Violet.

“Some things,” answered Van Hupfeldt.

“Our good hostess has been dreaming of soldiers, Mr. Van Hupfeldt,” put in Mrs. Mordaunt, lightly, “and it seems that such a dream always brings good news to her guests; so my daughter is feeling the effects of it.”

Van Hupfeldt looked puzzled, and asked: “Has Miss Violet heard that her orchids are flourishing in her absence, or that those two swans I promised have arrived?”

Violet and Mrs. Mordaunt exchanged glances of approval of this speech, the latter saying: “There are brighter things in the world than orchids, thank Heaven! and a kind deed may be more white and graceful than all the swans of Dale Manor.”

Van Hupfeldt looked still more puzzled—a look which was noted by the women, but was attributed by them to a wish not to seem to know anything of the joyful note, and was put down to his credit. After some minutes’ talk of a general nature, Mrs. Mordaunt went out. Violet sat in an easy-chair at one of the balcony windows. Van Hupfeldt leaned against the embrasure of the window. He seemed to brace himself for an effort before he said to her:

“This is Monday evening, and since Saturday, when I brought you from the cemetery, I have not once closed my eyes. If you continue to manifest this inconsolable grief for your sister’s fate, I must break down in some way. Something will happen. I shall go crazy, I think.”

“You mean very kindly, I suppose,” answered Violet, with lowered lids; “though I do not see—”

“No, you cannot see, you do not know,” said he, with a certain redness and strain in the eyes which made it a credible thing that he had not slept in some time. “But it is so. It has been the craving of my life to save you from this grief. Let me do it; you have to let me do it!”

“How save me?” she asked, with an upward glance under her long lashes, while she wondered at the blaze in the man’s eyes. “I am not to be saved from it by any means, though it will be lessened by the proofs of my sister’s honor and of her child’s fair name, and by the discovery of the whereabouts of the child. There are no other means.”

“Yes, there are! There is the leaving of your present life, the companionship of one who will have no care but to make you happy, to redress a little in you the wrong done to your sister. That is my motive—God knows!—that is my main motive—”

“Surely I do not understand you aright!” cried Violet, somewhat dismayed by his outburst. “Your motive is to redress a wrong done by some one to my sister by devoting yourself to make me happy? Certainly, that seems a most nobly disinterested motive; but is philanthropy of this sort the best basis for the kind of proposition which you are making me? Philanthropy most certainly would wear thin in time, if it did not rest on affection—”

“Do you doubt that I have affection?” he demanded, his voice vibrating with ill-repressed passion.

“As an afterthought?”

“How as an afterthought, when my life itself depends upon continually seeing you, and seeing you happy? I tell you that if you were to refuse my prayer this evening, if anything was to happen now or in the future to thwart my cravings with respect to you, my mind is made up, I would not continue to face the harrowing cark of life. Say ‘No’ to me, and from to-morrow evening you will be tortured by the same worm of remorse by which the man who caused the death of your sister must be gnawed and gnawed. You talk of affection? I have that. I do, yes, I do love you; but that would be the flimsiest motive compared with this passion which casts me at your feet.”

“I don’t understand him,” sighed Violet to herself—and no wonder, for Van Hupfeldt’s words came from him in a sort of hiss; his eyes were bloodshot; he stooped close over her, with veins standing out on his forehead. It was clear enough that the man’s soul was in this wooing, yet he made so little pretense of the ordinary lover’s love. He left her cold, this woman made for love, and she wondered.

“Tell me quickly,” he said, “I think that your mother is not unwilling. Only let me hear the word ‘Yes,’ and the ‘when’ shall be left to you.”

“Pray listen, Mr. Van Hupfeldt,” said Violet, bending over her knee, which she slung between her clasped fingers. “Let us reason together; let us understand each other better. I am not disposed to be unfriendly toward you—do not think that—nor even to reject your suit unconditionally. I owe you much, and I see that you are greatly in earnest; but I am not clear. Your motive seems to be philanthropic. You have said as much yourself, you know. Still, philanthropy is only warm; it is never hot to desperation; it never commits suicide in despair of doing good. That, then, is the first thing which I fail to understand in you. And, secondly, I do not grasp why you desire any closer relation to be set up between us for my happiness, when I assure you that nothing but the rehabilitation of my sister’s name could lighten my unhappiness, and that, this once done, nothing further could possibly be done by any one to attach me more to life.”

“But I am older than you, and know better,” answered Van Hupfeldt, seating himself beside her, speaking now more calmly. “You know nothing of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Travel alone would give you a new outlook. I should ever be inventing new pleasures and excitements for you. Sometimes, already, I lie awake at night, thinking them out. I am very rich, and all my wealth should be turned into one channel, to delight you. You know nothing of society in the States, of the brilliance and abandon of life across the Atlantic. And the Paris beau monde, with its charm and wit and easy joyousness, you know nothing yet of that. I should find the means to keep you constantly gay, to watch you in ever new phases, costumes, jewels—”

The thought passed through Violet’s mind: “He has distinguished manners, but a vulgar mind,” and she said aloud: “So that is how you would wean me from sorrow, Mr. Van Hupfeldt? I should prefer a week of Dale Manor with my birds and flowers to a cycle of all that.”

“Then it shall be Dale Manor rather than ‘all that,’” he agreed. “It shall be just as you would have it, if only you will be happy, and will give me a glance one day which means ‘My happiness is due to you.’ May I have another peep at the locket?”

Violet took a locket from her neck, pressed a spring, and showed within a miniature in water-colors of the dead Gwen. She shivered a little. Though she was speaking of her sister, the man’s sudden request jarred on her.

“I like to look at it,” said Van Hupfeldt, bending closer. “It reminds me of you—chiefly about the mouth and chin, about the dear little chin. She suffered, yes, she tasted sorrow, and since she suffered, you must not suffer, too. I kiss her instead of you, because she was like you.”

This, certainly, was an odd reason for Van Hupfeldt’s tenderness to the miniature, but Violet’s heart instantly warmed toward him for his pity of her beloved; and when he replaced the locket round her neck, saying: “So, then, do we understand each other now?” she found it hard to answer: “I’m afraid that I am as far from understanding as ever.”

“That will come in time, trust me,” said he; “but as to that little word ‘Yes,’ is it to be taken as uttered now?”

“No, not now,” she said gently, “though do not go away thinking it may never be. Let me be frank, Mr. Van Hupfeldt. You know quite well that I am not at present disposed to worship your sex, and that is really so. Honestly, I don’t think that the human species adorns the earth on which it lives, least of all the male part of it. If I wished to marry, I believe I should choose some poor tiller of the fields, who had never seen a city, or heard of the arts of vice. You see, then, that the whole notion of marriage must be sufficiently distasteful to me. I wouldn’t and couldn’t give myself; but I am quite willing to—to make a bargain.”

“A bargain?” He started, and his dark eyes stared at her blankly.

“Yes, it is better to be candid. When you have cleared my sister’s name, or found the child, as you hope to be able to do, then, if you desire me still the same, you will again speak to me. I cannot definitely part from my freedom without a certainty that you will be able to do what you hope; and it is only fair to you to let you know that I should probably consent to give the same promise to any other man who would and could do this much for me.”

Upon this Van Hupfeldt’s brow flushed angrily, and he leaped to his feet, crying: “But that will never be! Clear your sister’s name? You still talk like a child—”

Now it was Violet’s turn to stand up in astonishment, as she saw her castle in the clouds diminishing. She stared in her turn, with open lips, crying: “Do you say this? that it will never be?”

“How can you set a man’s life on the chance of the realization of such a mere dream?” asked Van Hupfeldt, irritated, saying more than was wise.

“A dream?” murmured Violet, as if in a dream herself. “Then, who is it that has sent me this?”

Thereupon she drew from her pocket David Harcourt’s unsigned note. She held it out to Van Hupfeldt, and he, without touching, leaned over and read it; apparently slowly; more than once, so Violet thought. He stood there looking at the letter an unconscionable time, she holding it out for him to read, while the man’s face bled away inwardly, as it were to death, and some power seemed to rivet his eyes, some power stronger than his effort to withdraw them.

The thought passing through Van Hupfeldt’s soul was this: “Some one knows that she was a ‘duly wedded wife.’ But who? And how? To him it is somehow ‘a pretty certain thing’; and the proofs of it ‘may sooner or later be forthcoming’; and then he will give these proofs to Violet.”

“I see, then, that it was not you who sent it to me,” said Violet at last, and, as she said it, a certain gladness, a little thrill of relief, occurred somewhere within her.

Van Hupfeldt straightened himself. His lips were white, but they smiled dreadfully, though for some part of a second he hesitated before he said: “Now, who told you that?”

“I do not, of course, know the facts,” said Violet; “but I should like to.”

“You may as well know,” said Van Hupfeldt, turning away from her. “Yes, I sent it.”

Violet flushed. His manner did not carry conviction even to a mind not used to doubt the spoken word. It was horrid to think he was lying. Yet an odd sheepishness was visible in his face; his voice was not strong and brave.

“Well, I am still in a maze,” she murmured. “Since it was you who sent it, and since you say in it that my sister’s honor is now ‘a pretty certain thing,’ and that ‘the proofs will be forthcoming,’ why did you say a moment ago that it is ‘a mere dream’ to look forward to their forthcoming?”

Van Hupfeldt was looking out of the window. He did not answer at once; only after a minute he replied without looking round: “It was I who sent you the note. Yes, it was I; and what I say in it is true—somehow—true in some way; but I did not wish you to make the realization of those hopes a condition of your giving yourself to me. Hence I said that your stipulation was ‘a mere dream.’ Now, you understand; now, I think, all is clear to your mind.”

Violet sighed, and made no answer. All was not so very clear to her mind. One thing only was clear, that the nobility with which she and her mother had credited Van Hupfeldt in sending the note anonymously, so that he might not claim a reward from her, was not a deep nobility; for he had promptly volunteered the information that it was he who had sent it. She felt some disgust. A woman disillusioned about a man rushes to the opposite pole. Let him but be detected to be not the hero which she had thought him, and steep is his fall. Henceforth he is not only not a hero but less than nothing in her eyes. Violet paced aimlessly through the room, then went to the window farthest from that at which Van Hupfeldt stood, and the unspoken words on her lips were: “The miserable man.”

At last Van Hupfeldt almost rushed at her, with the cry: “The promise on that sheet of paper in your hand shall be fulfilled, and fulfilled by me, I vow, I swear it to you! But the fulfilment of it must not be made a condition of our union. The union must come first, and then the fulfilment; and the quicker the union the sooner the fulfilment.”

“No, I will not have it so.”

“You must!”

“You are to release my wrist, Mr. Van Hupfeldt!”

“You must!”

“But why hold me?”

“Listen—your sister was a wedded wife. I know it, I have reason to know it, and I am certain that, if you marry me, within six months after the marriage I shall be in a position to hand you the proofs of everything—to tell you truly the whole history from beginning to end—”

“But why six months after? Why not six months before?”

“I have reasons—there are reasons. What I shall have to tell will be a pain to you, I foresee, a pain; but perhaps not a pain which you will be unable to outlive. Nevertheless, from what I already know of your sister’s history, I see that it must be told you after, not before, our union. It is a terrible history, I—gather, a harrowing tale. You don’t even guess, you are far from being able to hear it now, even if I could tell you now. Violet! say ‘Yes’ to me!”

“What? Without understanding anything?”

“Yes, Violet, turn to me! Violet, say ‘Yes’ to me!”

“But what guaranty—”

“My pledged word, nothing else; that is enough. I say that within six months, not more, from the day of our marriage you shall have all that you desire to know, even the child shall have been found, for already I am on its track. But unless you consent, you will never know, the child will never be found; for I shall be dead, and the knowledge which I am in course of gathering shall die with me. If you will not give yourself, then, agree to that bargain you spoke of.”

“One gives, in a bargain, for something one receives.”

“It is the only condition on which we can come together. I could not bring you to-day the proofs that you long for, even if I had them. It must be six months after—not less than six months after—and for then I promise, calling Heaven to witness. Believe in me! Not all things that a man says are true; but this is true. Violet, for Gwen’s sake, within a week—the sooner it’s done, the sooner you hear—within not more than two weeks—”

Violet, sore beset, shielded her eyes with a listless hand. Van Hupfeldt was pleading like a man battling for his last earthly good. And yet, and yet, he left her cold.

“I don’t doubt your promise,” she said with a charming shyness; “but it is a great matter, you give me no guaranties, you may fail, and then all will have been in vain.”

“I won’t fail. I shall so manage that there will be no chance of failure. And to prove my faith, if you say ‘Yes,’ I think I can undertake that within only two months after the marriage the child shall be unearthed, and within six the proofs of his legitimacy shall be handed you. That’s fair—that seems fairer—come, now. Only the marriage must be prompt in that case, without a fortnight’s delay. I can’t offer better terms. What do you say to it?”

Violet, without answering, suddenly cast herself upon the sofa-head, burying her face in it. A bitter lamentation came from her, so thin and low that Van Hupfeldt could scarce hear it. He stood over her, looking at her, his heart in his mouth; and presently, bending to her, he whispered: “Tell me!”

“God knows!” came from her brokenly.

He put his lips on her hair, and she shivered. “It is ‘Yes,’ then,” said he; “but pity me still more, and say that it shall be at once.”

“No,” she sobbed, “I must have time to think. It is too much, after all—”

At that moment Mrs. Mordaunt entered. Violet, aroused by the opening door, stood up with a bent head, an averted face, and Van Hupfeldt said, with a sort of frenzied laugh, to Mrs. Mordaunt: “See how the days are lengthening out already.”

Mrs. Mordaunt looked at Violet with a query in her glance; and Violet’s great eyes dwelt on her mother without answering by any sign that question of lifted eyebrows. The girl was puzzled and overwrought. Was it so that men won women, that some man had won her sister? Surely this was a strange wooing!

CHAPTER VIII

AT DEAD OF NIGHT

David Harcourt, meantime, had long since reached home after his interview with Miss L’Estrange, whereupon Mrs. Grover had presented him with her first specimen of housewifery in the shape of a lunch. But, as if to prove that the fates were against literature that day, she also presented him with a letter from the agent Dibbin, saying: “Herein please find address of Sarah Gissing, servant of the late Miss Gwendoline Barnes, as promised.”

David’s first impulse was to go straightway after the meal to interview this Sarah Gissing. Then he set his lips, saying to himself: “The day’s work,” and, after lighting his pipe, he walked up to his literary tools with the grimness of a man about to throttle an enemy. Whereupon he sat down and wrote something. When he came back to earth with a weary but taut brain, Mrs. Grover was gone for the day. It was near seven in the evening, and the prairie-wolf within was growling “Dinner-time.”

His mental faculties being now on a tension, he thought to himself that there was no reason why he should not be prompt, and call upon Miss Gissing that evening. Though, after dinner, a mortal lethargy and reaction seized upon him with the whisper, “To-morrow is better than to-day,” he proved true to his high-strung self, and went by bus to Baker-St., where he took train for the station nearest the village of Chalfont.

It was a sharp walk from station to village. There was no cab; and when he arrived at the Peacock Inn, where Sarah Gissing was now a barmaid, he learned that she was away on leave at a neighboring village. He strolled about the silent street until Sarah came home at ten o’clock, a thin girl, with projecting top teeth, and a chronic stare of wonderment in her eyes.

“You are not to be alarmed,” David said to her. “I only came to ask you a few questions about your late mistress, Miss Gwendoline Barnes, in whom I have an interest. No one will be harmed, as far as I am aware, by your telling me all that you know, while you and I may profit by it.”

They spoke in the tiny inn drawing-room, and Sarah in her coat, with her hat on, sitting on the piano-stool, stared and answered shortly at first. Little by little she was induced to utter herself.

“He was a tall man,” she said, “rather thin, dark and pale—”

“Straight nose?” asked David.

“Yes, sir, straight nose; a handsome man.”

“Black mustache, nicely turned out?”

“Yes, sir; he had a mustache.”

“Well, but all that says nothing. Many people answer such a description. Was there no photograph of him in the flat? Did you never see a photograph?”

“Yes, there was a photograph on the mantelpiece of Miss Barnes’s bed-room. In a silver frame it was; but the day after her death the silver frame was still there, and the photograph was gone, for I noticed it myself.”

“Do you realize that you are telling me a mighty odd thing,” said David with sudden interest. “How soon after the door was forced did you go into the flat?”

“Wasn’t I there when the door was forced? Didn’t I go in at once?”

“And how soon afterward did you notice that the photograph was gone from the silver frame?”

“How soon? Soon afterward.”

“It was not one of the men who forced the door who removed the photograph from the frame?”

“I don’t think that, sir. I would have noticed it if that had been the case.”

“When you went in you found the body of your mistress lying dead; the front door had been bolted inside; so there was no way for any one to have come out of the flat. And when you left your mistress the previous night the photograph was in its frame, but gone when the door was forced the next day. Those are the facts, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that seems to say that it was Miss Barnes herself who removed the photograph, doesn’t it? And it follows that the photograph is still in the flat?”

“P’raps she did it to screen him,” suggested Sarah, indulging in the vanity of thought. “I shouldn’t wonder if that was it. No doubt she tore up the photograph, or burnt it.”

“But you didn’t see any shreds or ashes of it anywhere?”

“Not of a photograph, although I did sweep out the place the same day, too. Still, that’s not to say she didn’t tear it up because there was no shreds of it, for there are ways and means.”

“Were there shreds of any kind about?”

“Yes; she must have torn up a good few letters overnight before doing what she did. There was no end of litter, for that matter.”

“But suppose she did not burn or tear up the photograph,” said David, “where would she have hidden it? Can you suggest a place? Did you ever know her to hide anything? For, if she hid one thing, she may have hidden others, mayn’t she?”

“I believe there’s one letter she must have hidden,” answered Sarah, “unless she destroyed it—a letter that came from Paris four days before she made away with herself. I saw the postmark and the handwriting, so I know. It was from him, for he was in Paris at the time, and it was that letter that was the death of her, I feel certain. It came about eleven o’clock, soon after breakfast. She was at the piano in her dressing-gown, singing, not ordinary singing, but a kind of moaning of different notes, practising her voice like—it used to give me the blues to hear her every morning, it was so doleful like, moan, moan, moan! So I says, ‘A letter for you, mum,’ and she first stared at it in my hand, then she jumped up sudden like, and kind of snatched it out of my hand. But she didn’t read it. She went with it to the front window, looking out, holding the letter behind her back with her two hands, trembling from head to foot. So, not having any excuse to stay, I went out, but didn’t quite close the door. I loitered for a little while; but, not hearing anything, I went about my work, till half an hour later something seemed to say to me: ‘Better have a look,’ and when I peeped into the drawing-room, there she was sitting on the floor with her face on the sofa, and the letter in her hand. I thought she had the neuralgia; she looked that much in pain, you never saw. I spoke to her, but she looked at me, sick like, and didn’t say nothing. I don’t believe she could have stood up, if she had tried, and it did go to my heart to see her struck down and helpless like that.”

David’s close interest in her story pleased the girl. Such a nice young man he was! Perhaps he might call again some evening.

“My missus wasn’t quite right the rest of her time, I don’t think,” she went on. “She wandered about the flat, restless as a strange kitten, singing bits of songs, and she had a sweet soprano voice, I’m sure, that pierced you through when she screamed out the high notes. She didn’t go to the theater any more, after the letter. The next day she comes to me in the kitchen, singing and chuckling to herself, and she says to me: ‘What are you doing here?’ says she. ‘How do you mean, mum?’ says I. ‘Listen, Sarah,’ says she, putting her face quite close to mine, ‘you shouldn’t be here, this is not a place for a decent girl like you. You are to understand that I am not married. I told you that I was; but it was a lie. I have a child; but I am not married,’ and she ran off, laughing again to herself, as wild as a bird.”

“No, not that!” interrupted David, for the outspoken revelation hurt him. “It was not so much that which I wished to hear. Let us talk of the letter and the man. You never saw the letter again? You can’t think what your mistress may have done with it?”

“No, I never saw it again,” said Sarah, “nor I can’t think where she may have put it, unless she tore it up. There’s only one queer thing which I can call to mind, and that is, that during the afternoon of the day before she died, I went out to buy some soda, and when I came back I found her standing on a chair, hanging up one of the pictures in the long corridor. I wondered at the time whether it had fallen down or what, though I didn’t say anything. But now I come to think of it—”

David thought to himself: “She was then hiding the marriage and birth certificates which Miss L’Estrange afterward saw when the picture fell. She was reluctant to destroy them, and yet wished to screen the man, having in her mind the purpose to take her own life. The man’s photograph and the fatal letter from him were not hidden in the picture, but somewhere else, perhaps. I must search every cranny.”

“Of course,” he said aloud, “you could easily identify her husband if he was shown to you again?”

“Oh, rather, sir,” Sarah answered, “I’ve seen him dozens of times. He used to come to the flat anyway twice a week, though sometimes he would be away for a goodish stretch, mostly in Paris.”

“They were an affectionate pair—fond of each other?”

“They were that, indeed,” said Sarah with a smile, as one who understood that sort of thing. “He, I’m sure, worshiped the ground she walked on, and she was just as bad. It came as a surprise to me that anything was wrong, though latterly she did use to have red eyes sometimes after he had been with her.”

“What name did she call him by?” asked David. “His name was Johann Strauss, wasn’t it?”

“He was a Mr. Strauss, sir, yes, but not the other name you say. At least, she always called him Harry.”

“Henry is sometimes the English for Johann, you see,” muttered David, with a random guess that Sarah was none the wiser. “Henry, too, was the name of the child, wasn’t it? How about the child? Don’t you know where it is?”

“I only know that she used to go every Tuesday and Thursday by the seventeen minutes past two train from Baker-St., and be back by six o’clock, so it couldn’t have been very far. ’Pon my word, sometimes she’d go half crazy over that child. There was a little box of clothes that she’s many a time made me waste half a day over, showing me the things, as if I’d never seen them afore, everything that was possible embroidered with violets, and she’d always be making—”

“Fond of violets, was she?” broke in David, ready enough to catch at the phrase.

“Oh, it was all violets with her,—violets in her hair, at her neck, at her waist, and all about the place. She had a sister called Violet, and I came to know the sister as well as I knew herself in a manner of speaking, she was always telling me about her. For often she had nobody to talk to, and then she’d make me sit down to hear about her mother and this Miss Vi and the child, and what she meant to do when her marriage could be made public, and that. She was a good, affectionate lady, was Miss Gwen, sir. You couldn’t help loving her, and it was a mortal hard thing what happened.”

It was just then that the mistress of the tavern looked in with an unsympathetic face; so David rose and slipped a gold coin into the hand of the staring Sarah. The talk had already lasted a long while, and the inn-door had to be opened to let him out.

He walked the two miles back to the station, and there learned that the last up-train for the night had just left. Even on the suburban lines there is a limit to late hours.

This carelessness on his own part caused him to growl. It was now a question either of knocking up some tavern, or of tramping to London—about twenty-one miles. However, twenty-one miles made no continent to him, and, after posting himself by questions as to the route, he set out.

Throwing his overcoat over his left arm, he put his elbows to his ribs, lifted his face skyward, and went away at a long, slow, swinging trot. One mile winded him. He stopped and walked for five minutes, then away he went again at a steady jog-trot; and now, with this second wind, he could have run in one heat to Bow Bells without any feeling but one of joy and power. He had seen Indians run all day long with pauses. He had learned the art from them, and London had scarce had time as yet to enervate him. Up hill and down dale he went steadily away, like a machine. It was dark at first, dismal in some places, the sky black, crowded with stars, like diamond-seed far sown; but suddenly, while he was trotting through the main street of Uxbridge, all this was changed, the whole look and mood of things underwent transformation, as the full moon floated like a balloon of light into the sky. It was then about one-thirty in the morning. Thenceforth his way was almost as clearly lit as by day.

Through dead villages he passed, through dead Ealing to Shepherd’s Bush; there were cats, and there were policemen, and one running man, little else. Here or there a constable was half-drawn into giving chase, but wisely forbore—he never would have caught David Harcourt. But at Shepherd’s Bush David came to the foot of a long hill, which he shirked, and drew up. From that point he walked to Notting Hill, past Kensington Gardens, toward Oxford Circus. It was near three A.M.

Walking on the south side of Oxford-St. eastward, he stopped to look at some books behind a grille. The moonshine was so luminous, the sky so clear, that he could see well enough to read their titles. This was the only quiet hour of London. There was not a sound, save the echo of a policeman’s tread some way off down Regent-St. Not even a night cab rattled in the distance. And then, on the other side of the street, his quick ears caught the passing of swift-gliding feet—a woman’s.

When David glanced round, already she was gone well past him, making westward, most silently, with a steady haste. She gave him the impression of having been overtaken by, of being shy at, the moonlight. His heart leaped in a spasm of recognition, almost of fear. And he followed, he could not help it; as water flows downward, as the needle follows the magnet, he followed, with the stealthy pace of the stalker, as silently as if he was tracking a deer, and as keenly.

His breathing, meantime, was as if suspended, his heart seemed to stand still. That form and motion, his instincts would have recognized them in midnight glimmer of dull lamps, and now they were before him in light. Still he could not believe his wits. He doubted whether he was not moonstruck, chasing a phantom made of the clair-obscure stuff of those dead hours of the night when dreams are rife in the world, and ghosts leer through the haunted chambers of the brain. That she should be walking the streets of London at three in the morning, alone, hastening secretly homeward like some poor outcast foreconscious of the light of dawn!—this savored somewhat of limbo and lunacy. For what good reason could she be thus abroad? A swarm of doubts, half-doubts, queer bodings, jostled in David’s heart. She might, indeed, have come out to summon a doctor, to obtain a drug in an emergency. But something in her air and pace, something clandestine, desperate, illicit, seemed to belie this hope. She turned north when she had gone so far west as Orchard-St., little thinking, apparently, that she was being shadowed, and thence sped on west and north alternately through smaller streets, a region in which the desolation of the sleeping city seemed even more confirmed. And David followed, with this thought in his mind, that, though he had not seen her face, he had a certain means of determining her identity—for, if the flying figure before him went to 60A, Porchester Gardens, the address which he had of Violet Mordaunt, then this must be Violet.

Not that in the later part of his chase he had the slightest doubt. The long black cloak, like those that nurses wear, inflated behind her, the kind of toque above it, the carriage of her head, the slope of her shoulders, all these were hers: and she sped direct, notwithstanding turns and twists, to Porchester Gardens. David, from behind the corner of a street, could see her go up the house-steps, bend over something in her hand, open the door, and slip on what must have been rubber overshoes. This secrecy revolted him, and again he almost doubted that it was she. But when she had gone in, he hastened from his street-corner to the door to read the house-number, and it was 60A.

She was gone now. It was too late to challenge and upbraid her. He already regretted that he had not dared. He was bitter at it. Something said within him: “Both sisters!” Some envenomed fang of anger, spite, and jealousy plagued him, a feeling that he was wholly out of it, and had no part nor lot in her life and acts; and then, also, like oil on the waters, came pity. He must home to his haunted flat, where the scent of the violets which he had bought greeted him on his entrance. It was near four o’clock. After looking gloomily for some time at the head in chalks, he read three letters which he had found in the letter-box. One of them was from Miss L’Estrange, and in it she said:

“I have asked my girl, Jenny, about the marriage and birth certificates which fell out of the picture, and there’s something funny about her.” (A woman never means humor when she uses that word funny.) “She wants to make out that she knows nothing about what became of them, but I believe she does. Perhaps she has found out Strauss and sold them to him, or perhaps she only means to do so, and you may get them from her if you be quick and bid high. Anyway, I have done my best for you, and now it is in your own hands. You can come here whenever you like.”

But David was now suddenly not so devoted to the affairs of Violet and Gwendoline Mordaunt as he had been. What he had seen within the past hour made him bitter. He went foraging in the kitchen for something to eat, then threw himself into bed in a vexed mood, as some gray of morning mingled with the night.

CHAPTER IX

COMING NEAR

As for Henry Van Hupfeldt, he, too, at that morning hour lay awake in his bed. If ever man knew panic, it was he all that night. He had gone home from his interview with Violet, cringing in his carriage even from the glance of the passers in the streets, stricken to the heart by that unsigned note of David’s to Violet: “A pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife” ... “the proofs of it will be forthcoming.” Some one knew!

But who? And how? Van Hupfeldt locked himself away from his valet—he lived in chambers near Hanover Square—and for hours sat without a movement, staring the stare of the hopeless and the lost. The fact that he had as good as won from Violet the pledging of herself to him—that fact which at another time would have filled him with elation, was now almost forgotten in the darkness of his calamity, as a star is swallowed up by clouds. The thing was known! That known which had been between the chamber of his heart and God alone! A bird of the air had whispered it, another soul shared in its horror. The faintest hiss of a wish to commit murder came from between his teeth. He had meant well, and ill had come; but because he had meant not badly and had struggled hard with fate, let no man dare to meddle! He could be flint against the steel of a man.

His eyes, long bereft of sleep, closed of themselves at last, and he threw himself upon his bed. But the pang which pierces the sleep of the condemned criminal soon woke him. He opened his eyes with a clearer mind, and set to thinking. The unsigned note to Violet was in a man’s hand. Some nights before in the cemetery he had found a man near the grave with her, and the man had seemed to be talking with her, a young, sunburned man. Who he was he had no idea; he had no reason to think this was the man who had sent the note. There was left only Miss L’Estrange. She might have sent it, getting a man to write for her—suspicion of itself fixed upon her. Always he had harbored this fear, that some paper, something to serve as a clue, had been left in the flat, which would lie hidden for a time, and then come forth into the noonday to undo him utterly. Gwendoline, he knew, had wished to screen him; but the chances were against him. He had never dared to go into the flat alone, to take the flat in his own name, and search it inside out. The place was haunted by a light step, and a sigh was in the air which no other ear could hear, but which his ear would hear without fail. Within those walls his eyes one night had seen a sight!

He had not dared to take the place; but he had put Miss L’Estrange into it, and she had failed him; so, suspecting at last that she did not search according to the bargain, he had threatened to stop supplies, in order merely to spur her to search, for his heart had always foreboded that there was something to find.

Gwen, he knew, had kept a diary. Where was that? His photographs, where were they? His last letter to her? The certificates? Had they all been duly destroyed by her? Had she forgotten nothing? But when he had attempted to spur L’Estrange, the woman had flown into a fury, and he had allowed himself to lose his temper. How bitter now was his remorse at this folly! He ought to have kept some one in perpetuity in the flat, till all fear of anything lying hidden in it was past. He suspected now that L’Estrange might have found some document, and had kept it from him through his not being well in her favor during the last weeks of her residence. He groaned aloud at this childishness of his. It was his business to have kept in touch with her, to have made her rich. But it was not too late.

So, on the following evening, he presented himself at the stage-door of the theater where Miss Ermyn L’Estrange was then displaying her charms, in his hand an écrin containing a rivière of diamonds. He said not one word about his motive for coming to her after so long, but put out an every-day hand, as if no dispute had been between them.

“Well, this is a surprise!” said she. “What’s the game now?”

“No game,” said he, assuming the necessary jauntiness. “Should old acquaintance be forgot?” They drove together to the Café Royal.

“It was just as I tell you,” she explained in the cab, driving later to Chelsea. “I never saw one morsel of any paper until that last day, when the two certificates dropped out of the picture, and them I wouldn’t give you because of the tiff. I’m awfully sorry now that I didn’t,” she glanced down at the rivière on her palm; “but there, it’s done, and can’t be undone—nature of the beast, I s’pose.”

“And you really think Jenny has them? Are you sure, now? Are you sure?” asked Van Hupfeldt, earnestly.

“That’s my honest belief,” she answered. “I think I remember tossing them to Jenny, and as Jenny knew that I had gone into the flat specially to search for papers for you, she must have said to herself: ‘These papers may be just what have been wanted, and they’ll be worth their weight in gold to me, if I can find Mr. Strauss.’ No doubt she’s been looking for you ever since, or waiting for you to turn up. When I said to her yesterday: ‘What about those two papers that dropped out of the picture at Eddystone Mansions?’ she turned funny, and couldn’t catch her breath. ‘Which two papers, miss?’ she says. ‘Oh, you go on,’ I said to her; ‘you know very well. Those that dropped out of the picture that fell down.’—‘Yes,’ said she, ‘now I remember. I wonder what could have become of them? Didn’t you throw them into the fireplace, Miss L’Estrange?’—‘No, I didn’t, Jenny,’ I said to her, ‘and a woman should lie to a man, not to another woman; for it takes a liar to catch a liar.’—‘But what lie am I telling, Miss L’Estrange?’ says she. ‘I am not sure,’ I said, ‘but I know that you ought to tie your nose with string whenever you’re telling a lie, for your nostrils keep opening and shutting, same as they’re doing now.’—‘I didn’t know that, I’m sure,’ says she. ‘That’s queer, too, if my nostrils are opening and shutting.’—‘It’s only the truth,’ I said to her; ‘your mouth is accustomed to uttering falsehood, and it doesn’t mind, but when your nostrils smell the lie coming out, they get excited, my girl.’—‘Fancy!’ says she. ‘That’s funny!’—‘So where’s the use keeping it up, Jenny?’ I said to her. ‘You do make me wild, for I know that you’re lying, and you know that I know, and yet you keep it up, as if I was a man, and didn’t know you. If you’ve got the papers, say so; you are perfectly welcome to them, for I don’t want to take them from you,’ I said. ‘Well, you seem to know more than I do myself, miss,’ she says. ‘Oh, you get out!’ I said to her, and I pushed her by the shoulders out of the room. That’s all that passed between us.”

“For what reason did you ask her about these papers yesterday in particular?” demanded Van Hupfeldt, thickly, a pain gripping at his heart.

“I’ll tell you. The new tenant of the flat came to me—”

“Ah! the flat is let again?”

“What, didn’t you know? He’s only just moved in—a young man named David Harcourt.”

“And he came to you? What about?”

“Asking about papers—”

“Papers? What interest can he have in them? And you told him about the certificates?”

“Yes.”

“Gott in Himmel!”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“You told him about the certificates? Then it was he who wrote the note!”

“Which note? Don’t take on like that—in a cab!”

“You told him! Then it was he—it was he! How does he look, this young man? What kind of young man?” Van Hupfeldt wanted to choke the woman as she sat there beside him.

“Come, cheer up, pull yourself together; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. I’m sure I didn’t know that I was injuring you by telling him, and even if I had known, I should still have told him—there’s nothing like being frank, is there? You and I weren’t pals—”

“But what is he like, this young man?”

“Not a bad sort, something like a Jameson raider, a merry, upstanding fellow—”

“It was he who was at the grave with her!” whispered Van Hupfeldt to himself, while his eyes seemed to see a ghost. “And you told him all, all! It was he, no other. What name did you give him as that of the husband on the marriage-lines? Did he ask that, too? Did you tell him?” With a kind of crazy secrecy he asked it at her ear, panting for the answer.

“I didn’t remember the husband’s name,” she answered. “I told him it wasn’t Strauss, but van or von Something. And don’t lean against me in that way. People will think you are full.”

“Van? You told him that? And what did he say then?”

“He asked if it wasn’t van Something, I forget what, Van Hup—something. I have an awful bad memory for names, and, look here, don’t come worrying me with your troubles, for I’ve got my own to look after.”

Van Hupfeldt’s finger-nails were pressed into the flesh of his palms. This new occupier of the flat, then, even knew his name, even suspected the identity of Strauss with Van Hupfeldt. How could he know it, except from Violet? To the pains of panic in Van Hupfeldt was added a stab of jealousy. That Violet knew this young man he no longer doubted, nor doubted that the meeting at the grave was by appointment. Perhaps Violet, eager to find suspected papers of her sister’s, had even put this man into the flat, just as he, Van Hupfeldt, had once put Miss L’Estrange there. At all events, here was a man in the flat having some interest or other in Violet and in Gwendoline’s papers, with the name Van Hupfeldt on his lips, and a suspicion that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss, the evil genius of Gwendoline!

“But there must be no meddling in my life!” Van Hupfeldt whispered to himself, with an evil eye that meant no good to David.

When the cab drew up before Miss L’Estrange’s dwelling, she said: “You can’t come up, you know; it is much too late. And there isn’t any need. I will let Jenny go to you as early as you like in the morning if you give me your address, or you can come yourself to-morrow—”

“Ah, don’t be hard on me,” he pleaded. “I mustn’t lose a night. Send her down to me, if I can’t go up.”

“Go on, the poor girl’s asleep,” she answered. “Where’s the use in carrying on like a loony? Can’t you take it coolly?”

In the end he had to go without seeing Jenny, having left his card on the understanding that she should be with him not later than ten in the morning, and that Miss L’Estrange should keep his address an inviolable secret.

The moment he was gone from her, Ermyn L’Estrange darted up the stairs, as if to catch something, and, on entering her flat, tripped into her bed-room, turned on the light, threw off her cloak, and put on the necklace before her mirror. It was a fine affair, and no mistake, all lights and colors playing bo-peep in the stones. She made a curtsy to her image, inspected herself on every side, stepping this way and that, daintily, like a peacock, keenly enjoying the gift, till the novelty of possessing it was gone stale. But at no time did she feel any gratitude to the giver, or think of him at all in connection with it—just the fact of having it occupied her mind, it didn’t matter whence.

And the mere knowledge that it was so valuable proved it to be a bribe, pointed to a weakness in the giver. Some gifts to women, especially splendid ones, produce not only no gratitude, but a certain hardness of heart, contempt, and touch of enmity. Perhaps there is a feeling of “I ought to be grateful,” but being too happy to be grateful, they are bored with a sense of fault, and for this they punish the giver with the opposite of gratitude.

At all events, by the time Miss L’Estrange had taken off the string of gems, a memory had grown up within her of David Harcourt, and with it came a mild feeling of partizanship and liking for David as against Strauss. It was a wayward machine, that she-heart under the bodice of Miss Ermyn L’Estrange—wayward without motive, subtle without thought, treacherous for treachery’s sake. As a matter of fact, before waking Jenny, it came into her head to “give a friendly tip” to David on the ground that he was “not a bad sort,” and she actually went out of her way to send him a post-card, telling him that she had expected him to call on Jenny that day, and that, if he meant business, he must see her not later than half-past nine the next morning, or he would be too late.

What a web, this, which was being spun round the young adventurer from Wyoming!

CHAPTER X

THE MARRIAGE-LINES

David had not gone to interview Jenny the day before in obedience to Miss L’Estrange’s first note, because of the sullen humor to which he relapsed after his experiences at three in the morning in the streets of London. He resented the visiting of the glimpses of the moon by a young lady who donned rubber overshoes before re-entering her house, and he said to himself: “The day’s work, and skip the Violets.”

Then, the next morning, came Miss L’Estrange’s second letter—“he must see Jenny not later than half-past nine” or he would be “too late.” Again this failed to rouse him. With those lazy, lithe movements of the body which characterized him, he strolled for some time about the flat after his early breakfast, uncertain what to do. He saw, indeed, that some one else must be after the certificates—Strauss—Van Hupfeldt—if Strauss and Van Hupfeldt were one; but still he halted between two opinions, thinking: “Where do I come in, anyway?”

Then again the face which he had seen at the grave rose before him with silent pleadings, a face touching to a man’s heart, with dry rose-leaf lips which she had a way of wetting quickly, and in her cheeks a die-away touch of the peach, purplish like white violets. And how did he know, the jealous youth, by what hundred reasons her nightly wandering might be accounted for? Why did he nourish that sort of resentment against a girl who was a perfect stranger? Perhaps there was really some jealousy in it! At which thought he laughed aloud, and suddenly darted into action, snatched a hat, and went flying. But then it was already past nine.

When he reached Miss L’Estrange’s flat, for some time no one answered his ring, and then the door opened but a little way to let out a voice which said: “What is it? I am not dressed. She’s gone. I told you you’d be too late.”

“Is she gone?” said David, blankly, eager enough now to see her.

“Look here, why should I be bothered with the lot of you at this ungodly hour of the morning?” cried the fickle L’Estrange. “I can’t help your troubles! Can’t you see when anybody is in bed?”

“But why did you let her go before I came?” asked David.

“You are cool! Am I your mother?”

“I wish you were for this once.”

“Nice mother and son we little two would make, wouldn’t we?”

“That’s not the point. I’m afraid you are getting cold. You ought to have contrived to keep the girl till I came, though it is my own fault. But can’t anything be done now? Where is she gone to?”

“To Strauss, of course.”

“With the certificates?”

“I suppose so. I know nothing about it, and care less. I did try to keep her back a bit for your sake, but she was pretty keen to be gone to him when once she had his address, the underhanded little wretch!”

“But stop—how long is it since she has gone?”

“Not three minutes. It’s just possible that you might catch her up, if you look alive.”

“How can that be? I shouldn’t know her. I have never seen her. We may have passed each other in the street.”

“Listen. She is a small, slim girl with nearly white hair and little Chinese eyes. She has on a blue serge skirt with my old astrakhan bolero and a sailor hat. Now you can’t miss her.”

“But which way? Where does Strauss live?”

“I promised not to tell, and I’m always as good as my word,” cried the reliable Miss Ermyn L’Estrange, “but between you and me, it’s not a thousand miles from Piccadilly Circus; and that is where Jenny will get down off her bus; so if you take a cab—”

“Excellent. Good-by! See you again!” said David.

David was gone, in a heat of action. He took no cab, however, but took to his heels, so that he might be able to spy at the occupants within and on the top of each bus on the line of route, by running a little faster than the vehicles. At this hour London was already out of doors, going shopping, going to office and works. It was a bright morning, like the beginning of spring. People turned their heads to look at the man who ran faster than the horses, and pried into the buses. Victoria, Whitehall, Charing Cross, he passed—still he could see no one quite like Jenny. He began to lose hope, finding, moreover, that running in London was not like running in Wyoming, or even like his run from Bucks. Here the air seemed to lack body and wine. It did not repay the lungs’ effort, nor give back all that was expended, so that in going up the steep of Lower Regent-St. he began to breathe short. Nevertheless, to reward him, there, not far from the Circus, he saw sitting patient in a bus-corner the sailor hat, the bolero, the Chinese eyes, and reddish white hair of Jenny.

The moment she stepped out, two men sprang forward to address her—David and Van Hupfeldt’s valet. Van Hupfeldt lived near the lower portion of Hanover Square, the way to which being rather shut in and odd to one who does not know it, his restlessness had become unbearable when Jenny was a little late, so he had described her to his valet, a whipper-snapper named Neil—for Van Hupfeldt had several times seen Jenny with Miss L’Estrange—and had sent Neil to Piccadilly Circus, where he knew that Jenny would alight, in order to conduct her to his rooms. However, as Neil moved quickly forward, David was before him, and the valet thought to himself: “Hello, this seems to be a case of two’s company and three’s none.”

David was saying to Jenny: “You are Miss L’Estrange’s servant?”

“I am,” answered Jenny.

“She sent me after you. I must speak with you urgently. Come with me.”

Now, in Jenny’s head were visions of nothing less than wealth—wealth which she was eager to handle that hour. She said, therefore, to David: “I don’t know who you are. I can’t go anywhere—”

They stood together on the pavement, with Neil, all unknown to David, behind them listening.

“There’s no saying ‘No,’” insisted David. “You’re going to see Mr. Strauss, aren’t you? Well, I am here instead of Mr. Strauss in this matter.”

But this ambiguous remark failed of its effect, for Neil, whose master had told him that in this affair he was not Van Hupfeldt but Strauss, intervened with the pert words: “Begging your pardon, but I am Strauss.”

However, this short way of explaining that he was there on behalf of Strauss was promptly misunderstood by Jenny, who looked with disdain at the valet, saying: “You are not Mr. Strauss!”

“Of course he isn’t,” said David, quickly. “How dare you, sir, address this lady? Come right away, will you? Come, now. Let’s jump into this cab.”

“Who are you? I don’t even know you!” cried the perplexed Jenny.

“I didn’t say I was Mr. Strauss himself,” began Neil.

“Yes, you did say so,” said Jenny, “and it isn’t the truth, for I know Mr. Strauss very well, and neither of you isn’t going to get over me, so you know!”

“Don’t you see,” suggested David, his wits all at work, “that one of us must be true, and as you are aware that he is false—”

“What is all this about?” demanded Jenny. “I have no business with either of you. Just tell me the way to Hanover Square, please, and let me go about my business.”

“That’s just why I’m here, to show you the way,” said Neil. “I dunno why this gentleman takes it upon himself—”

“Best hold your tongue, young man,” growled David. “You must be stupid to think this young girl would go off with you, a man she never saw before, especially after detecting you in a direct untruth—”

“As for that, she don’t know you any more than me, seemingly,” retorted Neil. “Mr. Strauss sent me—”

“How is she to know that? Miss L’Estrange sent me. Didn’t I know your name, Jenny, and your mistress’s name?”

“Well, that’s right enough,” agreed Jenny on reflection.

“Then trust to me.”

“But what is it you want, sir?”

“It is about the papers,” whispered David, confidentially. “It is all to your good to come with me first and hear what I have to say. Miss L’Estrange—”

“Well, all right; but you must be quick,” said Jenny, rushing to a decision.

David hailed a cab, and he and Jenny turned their backs upon the defeated valet, got in, and drove off. However, Neil, who had witnessed Van Hupfeldt’s fever of eagerness to see this girl, followed in another cab. David drove to the Tube Station near Oxford Circus—she would accompany him no farther—and, while he talked with Jenny in a corner there, Neil, lurking among the crowd of shop-gazers across the street, kept watch.

“I propose to you,” David said to Jenny, “to give the certificates to me, and in doing so, I understand that you are a poor girl—”

“That’s just it,” answered Jenny, “and I must know first how much I am to get for them—if it’s true that I have any certificates.”

“Right enough,” said David, “but the main motive which I hold out to you is not what you will receive in hard cash, but that you will do an immense amount of good, if you give the papers to me. They don’t belong to this Mr. Strauss, but they do belong to the mother and sister of a poor wronged lady, a lady whose character they will clear.”

“Ah, no doubt,” agreed Jenny, with the knowing leer of a born Cockney; “still, a girl has got to look after herself, you see, and not mind other people’s troubles.”

“What!” cried David, “would you rather do the wrong thing and earn twenty pounds, or do the right thing and earn five pounds? You can’t be in earnest saying that.”

“It isn’t a question of five pounds, nor yet of twenty,” snapped Jenny, offended at the mere mention of such paltry sums, “it’s a question of hundreds and of thousands.” Her mouth went big for the “thousands.” “Don’t think that I’m going to part with the papers under high figures, if so be I have any papers.”

“Under what?” asked David—“under hundreds, or under thousands?”

“Under thousands.”

“Now hold on a bit. Are you aware that I could have the papers taken from you this minute, papers that don’t belong to you, which you propose to sell to some one other than the rightful owners?”

At this Jenny changed color. There was a policeman within a few yards, and she saw her great and golden dream dissolving.

“It remains to be seen if I have got any papers. That’s the very question, you see!” she said.

“You might be searched, you know, just to clear the point. Yet you needn’t be afraid of that, for I’m disposed to meet you, and you aren’t going to refuse any reasonable offer, with no trouble from the police to follow. So I offer you now—fifty golden sovereigns for the papers, cash down.”

“You leave me alone,” muttered Jenny, sheepishly, turning her shoulder to him.

“Well, I thought we were going to be friends; but I see that I must act harshly,” David said, making a threatening movement to leave her.

“You can have them for one hundred pounds,” the girl murmured in a frail voice with downcast eyes; to which David, not to drive a hard bargain with her, at once answered: “Well, you shall have your one hundred pounds.”

The next moment, however, he was asking himself: “Who’s to pay? Can I afford these royal extravagances in other people’s affairs? Steady! Not too much Violet!”

He walked a little way from the girl, considering it. He could not afford it. There was no earthly reason why he should. But he might go to Violet, to Mrs. Mordaunt, and obtain the one hundred pounds, or their authorization to spend that sum on their behalf. In that case, however, how make sure of Jenny in the meantime? It would hardly do to leave her there in the station, so near to Strauss. She would be drawn to him as by a magnet, and he thought that if he took her with him to the Mordaunts, she would recover her self-assurance and demand from the women more, perhaps, than they could afford. In the end, he decided to take her to his flat, and leave her there in Mrs. Grover’s charge till he returned from the Mordaunts.

“That’s a bargain, then,” he said to her; “one hundred it is. I take it that you actually have the certificates on you?”

“I may have,” smirked the elusive Jenny.

“That’s all right. ‘Have’ and ‘may have’ are the same things in your case. So now I shall go right away to procure the one hundred pounds, and meantime you’ll come with me to your old flat in Eddystone Mansions—that’s where I live now—No, don’t be scared, there’s some one there besides myself, and the ghost doesn’t walk in the daytime.”

They hailed another cab, and again Neil, leaving his lurking-place, drove after them. He saw David and Jenny go into the mansions, then stood uncertain whether to hurry home and tell the position of affairs to Van Hupfeldt, who, he knew, must by this time be raving, or whether to wait and see if Jenny and David came out again.

He was loitering a little way up the house-stairs, thinking it out, when he heard the lift coming down, and presently he saw David rush out—alone. Jenny, then, was still in the building. Neil ran to the lift-man.

“Gentleman who just come down,” he said, “does he live here?”

“He do, in No. 7,” was the answer.

“Girl’s left in his flat, then,” thought Neil, scratching his head, “and the bloke wot owns the flat don’t know I’ve been spying. I’d better hurry back and let the master know how things are looking.”

Whereat the valet, who was clearer in action than in speech, ran out and took cab to Hanover Square, to tell Van Hupfeldt where Jenny was.

CHAPTER XI

SWORDS DRAWN

David, meantime, also by cab, was off to Porchester Gardens, a certain hurry and fluster now in his usually self-possessed bosom. He looked at his face in the cab-mirror, and adjusted his tie. A young man who acts in that way betrays a symptom of heart-disease. At 60A he sent up his card.

Violet knew from Dibbin the name of David Harcourt, but when she read it she seemed startled, and turned a little pale. “Show him up,” she said, in a flurry.

“You will excuse my calling,” explained David, without shaking hands, “though we have met before—you remember?”

She inclined her head a little, standing, as it were, shrunk from him, some way off.

“But my visit has to do with a small matter which admits of no delay.”

“My mother—” she began.

“Is out, I know,” said he, “but as the affair is urgent, I am here. You know that I am the tenant of No. 7, Eddystone Mansions, and you know also, that, without seeking it, I have some knowledge of your history. I wish to ask whether, without troubling your mind with a lot of details, you care to authorize me to spend at once, in your interests, a sum of one hundred pounds.”

She scrutinized him with a certain furtiveness, weighing him.

“In my interests?” said she.

“Yours and your mother’s.”

“One hundred pounds?”

“Yes.”

“It seems a strange request.”

“It isn’t a request. If you haven’t confidence in me to the extent of one hundred pounds, I am not deeply concerned.”

“But you come like a storm, and speak like one.”

“On a purely business matter of your own—remember.”

“You were at the pains to come,” she said with a smile. “You cannot both care and not care.”

“I used the word ‘concern,’ you know.”

“Is it a gracious way to approach me?”

“Is it charming to be mistrusted?”

“Did I say that I mistrusted you?”

“With your eyes.”

“Well, I say now with my lips that I do not. Which will you believe?”

“No doubt they can both deceive.”

“Oh, now you are verging on rudeness.”

“There are worse things than rudeness, when one thinks of it.”

“I have no idea to what you refer.”

“That may be because I know more about you than you think.”

At this she started guiltily, visibly, and at that start again she appeared before the eye of David’s memory gliding through the moonlight at three in the morning, a ghost hastening back to the tomb. Yet, in her presence, the resentment which rankled in him softened to pity. A look of appeal came into her dark eyes, and a certain essence of honesty and purity in her being communicated itself to his instincts, putting it out of his power to think any ill of her for the moment.

He said hurriedly: “I fear I have begun badly. All this is neither here nor there.”

She sat down, slung a knee between her clasped fingers in her habitual manner, and said: “Please tell me, what do you mean?” Then she looked up at him again with a troubled light in her eyes.

He walked quickly nearer to her, saying: “Now, don’t let that get into your head as a serious statement. It was a mere manner of speaking, what I said, and of no importance. Moreover, there’s this question of one hundred pounds, and time is a vital consideration.”

“Nevertheless, you were definite enough, and must have had some meaning,” she went on. “Did I not hear you say that you know more about me than I think? Well, then, have the goodness to tell me what.”

“Now I have put my foot in it, I suppose,” said David, “and you will never rest till I find something to tell you. But not now, if you will bear with me. In a few days I shall, perhaps, call on your mother, or see you again at a place which you no doubt visit pretty often at about the same hour, and to which I, too, somehow am strangely drawn. The question now before us is whether I am to spend the one hundred pounds for you.”

“As to that, what can one say? You tell me nothing of your reason, my mother is out, and I am afraid that I have not at the moment one hundred pounds of my own. I am about to be married, and—”

“Married?”

“I am myself rather surprised at it. Yet I fail to see why you should be immoderately surprised.”

“I? Surprised?” said he in a dazed way, still standing with one foot drawn back a step. “I was merely taken aback, because—”

“Well?”

“Because—nothing. I was simply taken aback, that’s all. Or rather because I had not heard of it before.”

“It was only fully decided upon yesterday,” said she, bending down over her knee.

“Oh, only yesterday. And the happy event takes place when? for I am at least interested.”

“Soon. Within two or three weeks. I don’t quite know when.”

“And the happy man?”

“The same whom you saw come to take me from Kensal Green.”

“Mr. Van Hupfeldt?”

“Oh, you know his name. Yes; Mr. Van Hupfeldt.”

David chuckled grimly.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked.

“But whatever is your motive?” he cried sharply.

“You are strange to venture to inquire into my motive,” she said, with downcast eyes. Then her lip trembled, and she added in a low voice: “My motive is known only to the dead.”

“Ah, don’t cry!” he almost shouted at her, with a sudden brand of red anger across his brow. “There’s no need for tears! It shan’t ever happen, this thing!”

“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing tremulously at him.

“What I say. This marriage can’t happen. I’ll see to that. But stop—perhaps I am talking too soon. ‘Let not him boast that putteth his armor on as he that taketh it off.’ Good-day, Miss Mordaunt. I shall not trouble you any more about the one hundred pounds. I will spend it out of my own pocket pocket—”

“Please stay!” she cried after him. “Everything that you say bewilders me! How am I to believe you honest when you say such things?”

“What things? Honest? You may believe me honest or not, just as you will. I told you before that I am not greatly concerned. If I bewilder you, you anger me.”

“I am sorry for that. But how so?”

“What, is it nothing for a man to hear it doubted whether he is honest or not? And, apart from that, admit that your sister is not very long dead, and that you have been easily drawn into this engagement—”

“But what can all this matter to you?” she asked, with a wrinkled brow. “Why should my private conduct anger you at all? I have not, in fact, as you think, been so easily won into this engagement; yet, if I had, it is amazing that you should lecture me. If it was any one but you, I should be cross.”

“What, am I in special favor, then?”

“You have an honest face.”

“Then why is my poor honesty constantly doubted.”

“Because you say extraordinary things. It is not, for instance, usual for people to pay one hundred pounds for the benefit of a casual acquaintance as you just volunteered to do. Either you have some trick or motive in view, or you are very wonderfully disinterested.”

“Which do you think?”

“I may think one thing now, and the other after you are gone.”

“Well, it is useless arguing. I should be here all day, if I let myself. We were not made to agree, you see. Some people are like that. I shall just pay the one hundred pounds out of my own pocket—”

“You are not to do that, please.”

“Then, will you?”

“I think not.”

“You have no idea what is in question!”

“Then, give me some idea.”

“And lose more time. However, you may as well hear. It is this: that the tenant in the flat before me, one Miss L’Estrange, found concealed in a picture a certificate of a marriage and one of a birth, and I wish to buy them for you from Miss L’Estrange’s servant, who has them.”

Violet sprang upright with an adoring face, murmuring: “Heaven be thanked!”

“I didn’t tell you before,” said David, “because I haven’t secured the papers yet. I have left the girl in my flat—”

“But where—where do you say she found them?” she asked, with a keener interest than the question quite seemed to call for.

“It was in a picture-frame, between the picture and the boards at the back,” he answered. “The picture dropped, and the certificates fell out.”

“Heaven be praised!” she breathed again. “Was there nothing else that fell out?”

“Nothing else, apparently.”

“That was enough. Why should I want more? Oh, get them for me quickly, will you?” she cried, all animated and pink. “With these in my hand everything will be different. Even your prophecy against my marriage, which you seemed not to desire, will very likely come true.”

“So now I have your authority to spend the one hundred pounds?” he asked, with a smile.

“Of course! Ten times as much!”

“But blessed is she who has not seen, and yet has believed!”

“Forgive me! I do thank and trust you!” She put out her hand. He took it, and bent some time over it.

“Good-by, Miss Mordaunt.”

“Not for long—an hour—two?”

“I am glad to have pleased you. I shall always remember how the brunette type of angels look when they thank Providence.”

“It is not fair to flatter when one is highly happy and deeply thankful, for then one hears everything as music. Tell me of it some other time, when I shall have a sharper answer ready. But stay—one word. It is of these certificates that Mr. Van Hupfeldt, too, must somehow have got wind. Does the girl say that any one else knows of them?”

“A man named Strauss knows of them.”

At that name her eyelids fell as if her modesty had been hurt. “Does not Mr. Van Hupfeldt know of them?” she asked, with face averted.

“I cannot tell you—yet,” he answered, turning a little from her lest she caught the grim smile on his lips. “Why do you think that he may know?”

“Because some days ago he wrote me a note—it is this. It can refer only to these certificates, I suppose.”

She handed to David his own note—“It is now a pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife”—and David, looking at it, asked with something of a flush: “Did Mr. Van Hupfeldt say that it was he who sent you this? I see that it has no signature.”

“Yes, it was he,” said Violet.

“Ah!” murmured David, and said no more.

“If it was these certificates which he had in his mind when he wrote that note,” said she, “then he, too, as well as you, must have a chance of securing them from the girl. So you had better be careful that he is not beforehand with you.”

David looked squarely at her. “So long as you obtain them, what does it matter from whom they come?”

“Of course,” she replied, with her eyes on the ground, “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”

He took a step forward, whispering: “Must I be the winner?”

He received no answer from her; only, a wave of blood, a blush that flooded her being from her toes to the roots of her hair all of a sudden, suffused Violet, while he stood awaiting her reply. He put out his hand with a fine self-control. “Well, I must try,” he cried lightly. She just touched his fingers with hers, and the next moment he was striding from her.

His cab was waiting outside. Calling, “Quick as you can!” to the driver, he sprang in, and they started briskly away. He was well content inwardly. Something bird-like seemed new-fledged and fluttering a little somewhere inside. He had tasted the sweet poison of honey-dew.

As for doubt, he had none at the moment. Jenny he had left safe with Mrs. Grover; he was sure that she had the certificates with her. But when he reached the middle of Oxford-St., he saw that which made him start—Van Hupfeldt in a landau driving eastward, and, sitting beside the coachman, the valet Neil. What spurred David’s interest was the pace at which the landau’s horses were racing through the traffic, and also the face of the man in the carriage, so gaunt and wild, leaning forward with his two hands clenched on his knees, as if to press the carriage faster forward by the strain of his soul.

At once a host of speculations crowded upon David’s mind. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that Neil may have shadowed him and the girl to the flat, that Van Hupfeldt might have the daring to be on the way to the flat to win Jenny from him. He felt that he could hardly prevail against Van Hupfeldt with Jenny—Van Hupfeldt being rich—and the two high-steppers in the landau were fast leaving the cab-horse behind. An eagerness to be quickly at his flat rose in David, so without stopping his cab he stood out near the splash-board and cried to his amazed driver: “I say! You come inside, and let me drive.”

“Mustn’t do that, sir. It is more than my place is worth,” began the cabman.

“Two pounds for you, and I pay all fines—quick now!” said David.

The driver hesitated, but pulled up. He climbed down, went into the cab, and David was on the perch, reins in hand. Though some persons were astonished, luckily no policeman saw them. The horse, as if conscious of something from Wyoming behind him, began to run. David bolted northward out of the traffic, and careered through the emptier streets, while the old cab-horse wondered what London was coming to when such things could be, and praised the days of his youth. When David drew up at Eddystone Mansions, there was no sign of the landau. He ran up the stairs three at a time. He would not await the tardy elevator. In moments of stress we return to nature and cast off the artificial. Opening his door with his key, he made straight into the drawing-room where he had left Jenny. Then his heart sank miserably, for she was not there.

“Mrs. Grover!” he called, and when Mrs. Grover hurried from the kitchen, her hands leprous with pastry-dough, David looked at her so thunderously that she drew back.

“Where’s the girl, Mrs. Grover?” he growled.

“She’s gone, sir.”

“I see that. You let her go, Mrs. Grover?”

“Why, sir, a man came here, saying he had a message from you for the girl, and I let him in. They had a talk together, then she said she must be going. I couldn’t stop her.”

David groaned.

The man who had called was Neil, who, on hurrying to tell his master where Jenny was, had been sent back with instructions to try and induce her to leave the flat and come to Hanover Square. Neil had accomplished this to the extent of getting Jenny to leave Eddystone Mansions; but she would not go to Strauss, for David’s threat of the police if she disposed of the papers to any one else than their lawful owner was in her mind, and she now feared to sell the papers to Strauss, as she knew that she would certainly do if she once went to his rooms. Yet she was sorely tempted to sell to the lavish rich man rather than to the bargainer, and so, making a compromise between her fears and her temptation, she had told Neil that she would wait in a certain café, and there discuss the matter with Strauss, if Strauss would come to her. She was waiting there, and Strauss was going to her, led by Neil, when David had seen him in the landau.

At any rate, the girl was gone. David felt as if he had lost all things. He had promised the certificates; and Violet had said: “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”

Now Van Hupfeldt had, or would have, them. While he had been dallying and bandying words in Porchester Gardens, Van Hupfeldt had been acting, and he groaned to himself in a pain of self-reproach: “Too much Violet, David!”

He strode to and fro in the dining-room with a quick step, pacing with the lightness of a caged bear, his fists clenched, keen to act, yet not knowing what to do. The girl was gone, the certificates gone with her.

One thing, however, he had gained by the adventure, namely, the almost certainty that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss—for he had seen the valet, Neil, who at Piccadilly Circus had declared that he was Strauss’s servant, sitting on the box-seat of the landau in which was the man whom David had heard Violet at the grave call “Mr. Van Hupfeldt.” This seemed a sort of proof that Van Hupfeldt and Strauss were one. The same man who had been so bound up with the one sister, and had somehow brought her to her death, was now about to marry the other! The thought of such a thing struck lightning from David’s eyes.

“Never that!” he vowed in his frenzy. “However it goes, not that!”

And then he was angry afresh with her, thinking: “He can’t be much good, this man—she must be easily won.”

He could not guess that Van Hupfeldt had promised to clear her sister’s name six months after the marriage, and that this was her motive, and not love, for being won. He did not realize that the certificates now lost by him would have freed Violet from Van Hupfeldt. He believed that she was entering lightly into marriage with a man of great wealth. Again, in this unreasoning mood, he saw her in her nocturnal wanderings.

But bitterness and regrets could not bring back the certificates, in the gaining of which her honor was almost at stake. If he had known where Van Hupfeldt lived, he would have gone straight there. Nevertheless, Van Hupfeldt was not at home, was hurrying away from home, in fact. Here, then, was another point. Jenny had clearly not gone to Van Hupfeldt’s on leaving the flat, or why should Van Hupfeldt be racing eastward? It seemed that Jenny and Van Hupfeldt were to meet somewhere else, perhaps somewhere not far from the mansions. If David had only kept the landau in sight, he might have tracked Van Hupfeldt to that meeting! He felt now that, if he could come upon them, then, by the mere force and whirlwind of his will, he should have his way. On a sudden he went out again into the streets.

He ran southward at a venture. If there was a conference going on in any house near by, and if the landau was waiting outside, he should recognize it by the horses and by Neil on the box. But, as it turned out, even this recognition was not necessary, for, running down Bloomsbury-St., toward a carriage of which he caught sight standing before a French chocolate-shop at the Oxford-St. corner, he saw a man and a girl come out of the shop. The man lifted his hat and nodded toward the girl with his foot on the carriage-step, and then was driven off westward. Half a minute afterward David had overtaken the girl.

“You wretched creature!” he said, in the fierce heat of his anger and haste: “Hand me those certificates, and be quick about it!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea which certificates you mean,” said Jenny, as bold now as brass, for she had no doubt been strengthened by the interview in the shop, and assured of Van Hupfeldt’s protection.

This was enough for David. He understood from her words that the papers were now in Van Hupfeldt’s hands; whereat a flood of rage surged within him, and, without any definite purpose, he rushed after the carriage. It had not gone far, because of a block of traffic near Tottenham Court Road, and his hot face was soon thrust over the carriage-door. Van Hupfeldt shrank back into the farthest corner with a look of blank dismay.

“Yes, you can have them, Mr. Strauss—” began David, hotly.

“What is it?” muttered Van Hupfeldt, crouching, with his hand on the opposite door-handle. “That is not my name.”

“Whatever your name, or however many names you may own, you can have those papers now; but there may be other things where they came from, and if they’re there, I’m the man in possession, mark you, and I’ll be finding them—”

“Papers! What papers? Find what?” asked Van Hupfeldt, with a scared face that belied his words.

“You cur!” cried David, his heart burning hot within him; “make amends for your crimes while you may. If you don’t, I tell you, I shall have no mercy. Soon I shall have my hands on you—”

“Drive on!” screamed Van Hupfeldt to his coachman, and, the block of traffic having now cleared, the horses trotted on, and left David red-faced with fury, in imminent danger of being run over by the press of vehicles behind.

CHAPTER XII

THE NIGHT-WATCHES

David returned home angry with himself in all ways, not least for his loss of self-control in pursuing Van Hupfeldt with no object but to vent himself in mere threats. His suggestion to Van Hupfeldt that other documents besides the certificates might be hidden among the picture-frames in the flat was in the tone of a child’s boasting. One should find first, he told himself, and boast afterward. However, one of Mrs. Grover’s excellent little lunches put him straight, and, though work was a thousand miles from his mood that day, he compelled himself to do it, and the pen began to run.

But first he had said to Mrs. Grover: “I want you to get the steps, and take down every picture in the flat, except the three big ones, which I will see to myself.”

Then, with his flower-pot of violets on each hand, he was soon in the thick of the cow-boy and prairie-flower history which he had on hand. His stories were already known on this side by the whiff of reality they brought from the States, and were in some demand. Already the postman handed him printers’ proofs, and he had proved to himself that he possessed some of the wisdom of the serpent in choosing a reputable abode, because the men whom he entertained went away saying: “Harcourt has private means. He has taken to literature as a hobby,” an idea which made him popular. If certain editors, on the strength of it, wished to pay him half-rates, they were soon undeceived. David was much too hard a nut to crack in that easy way.

Meantime, neither by sight nor sound had he been reminded of the eery experience of his first night in No. 7. True, there were noises during the still hours, such as had twice thrilled Miss L’Estrange and Jenny. But they seemed quite natural to him. The dryness of the interior of the block of flats had loosened flooring-boards and dislocated cross-beams, until the mere movement of an article of furniture overhead, or the passing of a next-floor tenant from one room to another, would set going creaks enough to give rise to half a dozen ghost-panics.

That night he had to be at the Holborn Restaurant for an annual dinner of internationals, so he struck work soon after four, seeing that by then Mrs. Grover’s task of taking down and dusting was ended, and the pictures now lay in a pile by the dining-room sideboard. David procured himself a quantity of brown paper, with gum and pincers, sat on the floor by the pile, and, with an effort to breathe no faster than usual, set himself to work. It was not so slight a task as it looked, some of the pictures being elaborately fastened with brown paper, tacks, and bars; and, since they were not his own, he had to leave them not less trim than he found them. He was resolved to trust not even a workman in this search. However, being handy, a Jack of all trades, he had got some half dozen unfastened and again fastened before six o’clock.

His gum failing, he called upon Mrs. Grover, received no answer, called again, went searching, but could not find her in the flat. Wondering at this, he stepped outside the front door to invoke the services of the lift-man, when a little way down the stairs he caught a sound of voices in low talk. His ready ear seemed to detect the particular accent of his housekeeper, and he went downward, spying out who it might be. He wore slippers, and for this reason, perhaps, approached near the speakers before he was seen. They were Mrs. Grover and a young man. The latter, the moment he was aware of David’s presence, was gone like a thief, so David did not see his face—it was dark there at that hour—but he had an impression that it was Neil, Van Hupfeldt’s valet, and his legs of themselves started into chase; but he checked himself.

“Who was the man?” he asked Mrs. Grover, when they had gone back into the flat.

“I’m sure I don’t know his name, sir,” was her answer.

“You know him, perhaps. Is it the same who came here to speak with the girl I left in your charge?”

“I believe it is the same,” said Mrs. Grover, “though I didn’t see him well.”

“Oh, you believe. What on earth does he want of you?”

“He kept asking me questions. I told him to go about his business—”

“What did he want to know?”

“Whether I was satisfied with my place, and whether I didn’t think that a woman like me could better herself, considering the wages I’m getting—”

“That all he wanted to know?”

“That’s about all—things like that.”

David, looking at her, said: “I am sure he was quite right. You deserve five times the wages I am giving you; so if I pay you a month’s wages in advance now—”

“But, sir!”

“No, it’s no use, Mrs. Grover. You were born for greater things than this. Yet, wherever you go next, do be loyal to the man from whom you earn your bread against all the world. Here’s your money.”

In vain Mrs. Grover protested. The place was good enough for her, the flat not fit to be left as it was, things not washed, something on the fire. It was of no avail. As David’s servant she was suddenly dead. He saw her out with a hearty hand-shake at the door, and his best wishes.

Only after she was well gone did he remember that she had forgotten to deliver up the front door-key.

As it was now nearly time to dress for the dinner, he left his work on the pictures for the day. In the half dozen or so which he had taken to pieces he had found nothing, and was disillusioned, cross-tempered, disturbed by many things.

He sat down and wrote to Miss Violet Mordaunt: “I am sorry to say that I have failed to receive the documents of which I had the honor to speak to you. I have reason, however, to believe that your fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, has bought them, and from his hand you will perhaps receive them.”

But his conscience felt this letter to be hard, ironical, and not sincere; for if, as he suspected, Van Hupfeldt’s name was on the certificates as the husband of dead Gwendoline, Violet was little likely to receive them from Van Hupfeldt’s hand. So he tore up the note, and wrote another which equally reflected his ill-humor. Nor did this go through the post. In the end, though he knew that she must be anxiously awaiting a word of news from him, he shirked for the present the task of announcing his failure to her, and rushed out to the dinner.

He came home late, and as he stepped from the lift to the landing, something—a light or a fancy—caused him to start. It seemed to him that through the opaque glass of his door he had seen a light. Certainly, the impression was gone in one instant, but he had it. He went in with some disquiet of the nerves. All was dark, all still, within. He turned on three or four of the lights in rapid succession, and his eyes pierced here and there without discerning anything save familiar articles of furniture.

The flat was lonely to him that night. Though Mrs. Grover would not in any case have been there at that hour, yet the fact that she would not come in the morning as usual, the fact that he was now the only life in the little home, made him as solitary in London as a castaway in mid-sea. The fires were dead. He sat a little while in his overcoat by the dining-room fireplace, glanced at the heap of pictures, at the face of Gwendoline. And now again he started. Something in the aspect of the heap struck him as new, as not perhaps the same as when he had gone out.

But here again he seemed to himself the prey of his own fancies. He asked himself angrily if he was losing his memory and his grip of facts. He thought that he had left only two of the pictures in pieces; now three of them were without their backs. As he sat looking at them, the clock on the mantelpiece all at once ceased ticking, and this small thing again, due solely to his omission to wind the clock, had an effect upon his mood. He seemed to hear the sudden silence, as it were the ceasing of a heart-beat, and the “all is over” of the bereaved when the last breath passes. He rose and stretched himself and yawned, and took in with him to his bed-room one of the pots of violets, so that, if he scented violets, he should know whence the scent came. And he took care to turn on the light in his bed-room before turning off all the other lights. Could this be David, the man who used to sleep beneath the stars?

Now he lay down in the dark, and all was quiet. Only, from far away, from some other polygon in the hive of flats, came a tinkling, the genteel sound of the piano, very faint, as remote from him as was the life of her who played it. He was listening to it, thinking of the isolation in which all souls are more or less doomed to live, when the question occurred to him incidentally: “Am I really alone in this flat? As a matter of fact, is not some one with me?” He had seemed to hear a definite click, and if it was not in the flat, then, he thought, his ears must be losing their old trick of exactness.

He stole out of bed, and, without making the faintest sound, peeped out along the corridors. Nothing seemed to stir. Minute after minute he stood patiently, hearing only that shell-music which the tympanum of the ear gives out in deep silence. Once he caught a Lilliputian rush, and a screech, an escapade in mouseland. Behind him a small clock ticked in his bed-room, and presently there was yet another sound, low, but prolonged, as if paper was being very cautiously torn somewhere.

Instantly the instinct to grip his six-shooter in his hand rose in David. His former experience in the flat had caused him to have the weapon ready. Great is that moment when awe rises into indignation and action, as now with him. Silently, with every nerve strung, and each muscle nimble for the encounter, he stepped backward into his bed-room, and drew the weapon from beneath his pillow. No longer careful about hiding the fact that he was awake, he made a rush along the longer corridor into the hall, caught up the hall chair and table and threw them against the door, heaved up the hat-stand and placed it also against the door, thus blocking the enemy’s retreat. And he said to himself: “Be it ghost, or be it mortal man, let there be a fight to a finish this time!”

But he kept himself in the dark for safety’s sake, and, bold as his heart was, it beat fast, as he now stood in the farthest corner of the hall near the door, listening for his life. And anon he sniffed with his nostrils for a scent of violets, for a wafture from the grave, which came not.

But this waiting for he knew not what was not long to be borne. Wounds are not so grisly to the mind as the touch of a hand which cannot be grasped. He crept back in the dark along the wall, again noiselessly, into the corridor, into his bed-room, locked the door, and, with finger on trigger, switched on the light. Keeping his ear alert for whatever might happen outside, he searched the room. No one was under the bed, or anywhere there. He turned off the light, went out, and, in a similar manner, searched behind a locked door, wherever he found a key in the lock, each of the other two bed-rooms, and the bath-room. In that end of the flat there was no one, nor a scent of anything, save the perfume of the violets in his bed-room. And again he began to think that he must surely be the plaything of his fancies.

Along the corridor he crept again, and entered the drawing-room, locked the door, turned on the light, looked round to search. At that instant he heard, he felt, the flight of steps in the flat. It was the merest sign of something detected by some sixth sense acquired by him in harkening to the whispers of the jungle. These were steps as light and swift as a specter’s might be. But he had the notion that they fled out of the dining-room down the short passage between the kitchen and the servant’s room, and, quick as thought, he had out the drawing-room light, and was after them.

The door of the servant’s bed-room was on the left of the cross passage, that of the kitchen on the right, just opposite the other. He went like a cat which sees in the night, swift and soft, along the left wall, his breast pressed to it, until, coming to the servant’s bed-room door, he gave a twist to the handle to go in.

The handle turned a little, but not much. The door would not open. It seemed to be held by some one within, for it was not locked, since there happened to be no key in it.

Here, at any rate, was something tangible at last. And, when it came to be a question of main force, natural or supernatural, David was in his element. He set himself to get that door-handle round, and it turned. He put himself into the effort to press that door open, and it opened a little. But, all at once, it opened too much! and he plunged staggering within. At the same time he was aware of something rushing out; he had just time to snatch his revolver from the waist of his pajamas and fire, when his silent adversary was gone, and had vehemently slammed the door upon him. Almost at the same moment another door slammed—the kitchen-door. Then all was still again.

It was as when a mighty momentary wind seizes upon a house in the dead of night, slams two doors, causes something to bark, and passes on its way. The two slammings and the bark of the revolver were almost simultaneous—and silence swallowed them together.

David flew after the thing which had evaded him to the kitchen-door. His blood was up. During his first experience of something queer in the flat he had had an impression of a woman, perhaps on account of the scent of violets. But this time there seemed to be no such scent, and this latest impression was of a man—an impression hardly perhaps due to sight, for the servant’s room was about the darkest spot in the flat, its one small window being shrouded with tapestry curtains, and the outer night itself dark. But he somehow believed now that it was a man, and he flung himself again and again against the kitchen-door with no good meaning toward that man. For there could be no doubt that whoever or whatever it was, his visitant was now in the kitchen, since the door would not open.

After some vain effort to force it, he stopped, panting, thinking what he should do. There was a little pointed poker in the dining-room by which he might pick the lock; but before deciding upon this he again tried his power of shoulder and will against the door, and this time felt something give within. The door, too, was not really locked, having no key in it, as, in general, the keys of old flats become displaced. It was apparently only fastened, if it were fastened at all, by some catch or hook, for, after two or three more thumps, it flew wide.

David, catching the handle, held it a little ajar, and now again the stillness of the night was outraged by his shout through the slit: “Hands up! or I fire!” At the same instant he rushed in, and flooded the kitchen with light.

But no one was there! A pallor struck from the corners of his mouth to his cheek, even while his brow was flushed, and he stood aghast, with an astounding question in his eyes and in his heart.

CHAPTER XIII

NO MORE VIOLET

There was little sleep for David Harcourt that night. After his inrush into the kitchen, and his long amazement to find it empty, he again searched the flat throughout; no one but he was in it, and no one had gone out through the front door, for there stood his barricade of table, chair, and hat-stand, just as he had left it.

This seemed surely to show that he had to do with that which is beyond and above natural. Yet there were points against that view, too. There was, first of all, the spot of blood, for in the passage between the servant’s room and the kitchen he saw what seemed to be a spot of blood. The carpet was a brown pattern on a pink ground, and in one place the brown looked redder than elsewhere,—that was all. If it was blood, then the bullet shot by him, which he now found imbedded in the frame of the kitchen-door, may have passed through some part of a man; but he could not assert to himself that it was blood.

There were, however, the pictures. Unless he was dancing mad, the fact was certain that he had left only three of them with their backs undone, and now there were five—and he refused to believe that he was indeed moonstruck.

So, then, a man had been in the flat, since no ghost could materialize to the extent of picking tacks out of picture-frames. And, if there had been a man, that man was Van Hupfeldt, and no other. Van Hupfeldt’s motive would be clear enough. Miss L’Estrange had told Van Hupfeldt that the certificates had fallen out of the back of a picture. David himself had had the rashness, in his rage at the loss of the certificates, to say over the door of Van Hupfeldt’s landau that there “might be other things where the certificates came from.” Mrs. Grover had been seen that afternoon talking to Van Hupfeldt’s servant. She was evidently in process of being bribed and won over to the enemy. She may have told how David had had all the pictures taken down and was at work on them, and how he was to be out at an annual dinner that night. She may possibly have handed over to Van Hupfeldt the key of the flat, and Van Hupfeldt, in a crazy terror lest anything should be found by David in the pictures, may have come into the flat to search for himself.

All this seemed plausible enough. But, then, how had Van Hupfeldt got away? Had he a flying-machine? Was he a griffin? Were there holes in the wall?

But if, as a matter of fact, he or some other had been in the flat, and had some way got out other than by the front door, here was a new thought—that Gwendoline Mordaunt may not, after all, have committed suicide. Suicide had been assumed simply because of the locked and bolted front door. But how if there existed some other mysterious exit from the flat? In that case she might have been done to death—by Strauss, by Van Hupfeldt, if Van Hupfeldt was Strauss.

David, no doubt, was all too ready to think evil of this man. Nevertheless the question confronted him. Why, he asked himself, should Gwendoline have committed suicide? She was a married woman—the certificate, seen by Miss L’Estrange, proved that. True, Gwendoline had received some terrible letter four days before her death, as her servant had told David, and she had said to the girl: “I am not married. You think that I am; but I am not.” Still, a doubt arose now as to her suicide. Her sister Violet did not believe in the suicide. Nothing was certain.

However, this new theory of the tragedy put David upon writing to Violet the first thing in the morning. Vague as his doubt, it was a set-off against his shame of defeat in the matter of the certificates. It was something with which to face her. He resolved to tell her at once all that was in his mind, even his shocking suspicion that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss, and he wrote:

“Mr. David Harcourt has unfortunately not been able to secure the certificates of which he had the honor of speaking to Miss Mordaunt, but believes that her fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, may be in a position to give her some information on the subject. However, Mr. Harcourt has other matters of pressing importance to communicate to Miss Mordaunt for her advantage, and, in case she lacks the leisure to be alone in the course of the day, he will be pleased to be at her sister’s grave this evening about five, if she will write him a line to that effect.”

He posted this before eight in the morning, went off to seek his old charwoman in Clerkenwell, breakfasted outside, came home, and set to work afresh upon the pictures.

And that proved a day of days for him. For, before noon, on opening the back of a mezzotint of the “Fighting Temeraire,” he found a book, large, flat, and ivory-white. Its silver clasp was locked. He could not see within, yet he understood that it was no printed book, but in manuscript, and that here was the diary of Gwendoline Mordaunt. He was still exulting over it, searching now with fresh zeal for more treasure, when he received a note: “Miss Mordaunt hopes to lay some flowers on her sister’s grave this evening about five.”

Her paper had a scent of violets, and David, in putting it to his nostrils, allowed his lips, too, to steal a kiss;—for happy men do sometimes kiss scented paper. And he was happy, thinking how, when he presented the diary to her, he would see her glad and thankful.

At the very hour, however, when he was thus rejoicing, Van Hupfeldt was going up the stairs at 60A, Porchester Gardens. He was limping and leaning on his valet, and his dark skin was now so much paler than usual that on his entrance into the drawing-room Mrs. Mordaunt cried out:

“Why, what is the matter?”

“Do not distress yourself at all,” said Van Hupfeldt, limping on his stick toward her. “Only a slight accident—a fall off a stumbling horse in the park this morning—my knee—it is better now—”

“Oh, I am so sorry! But you should not have come; you are evidently still in pain. So distressing! Sit here; let me—”

“No, really,” said he, “it is nearly all right now, dear Mrs. Mordaunt. I have so much to say, and so little time to say it in. Where is Violet?”

“She is in her bed-room; will soon be down. Let me place this cushion—”

“She is well, I hope?”

“Yes; a little strange and restless to-day, perhaps.”

“What is it now?”

“Oh, some little fall of the spiritual barometer, I suppose. She has not mentioned anything specific to me.”

“You received my telegram of this morning?”

“Saying that you would come at half-past one? Yes.”

“Well, I am lucky to have found you alone, for in what I have now to suggest to you, I do not wish my influence to appear—let it seem to be done entirely on your own impulse—but I have to beseech you, Mrs. Mordaunt, to return to Rigsworth this very day.”

“To-day? Rigsworth? But there are still a host of things to be seen to before the wedding—”

“I know, I know. Even at the cost of putting off the wedding for a week, if you will do all that is to be done from Rigsworth instead of in London, you will profoundly oblige me. I had hoped that you would this do for me without requiring my reason, but I see that I must give it, and without any beating about the bush. Only give me first your assurance that you will breathe not one word to Violet of what I am forced to tell you.”

“Good gracious! What has happened?”

“Promise me this.”

“Well, I shall be discreet.”

“Then, I have to tell you that Violet has made an undesirable acquaintance in London, one whom it is of supreme importance, if our married life is to be a success, that she should see not once again. It is a man—No, don’t be unduly alarmed—I don’t for a moment suspect that their intimacy has proceeded far, but it has proceeded too far, and must go no farther. I may tell you that it is my belief that letters, or notes, have passed between them, and, to my knowledge, they have met at least once by appointment in Kensal Green cemetery, for I have actually surprised them there. Now, pray, don’t be distressed. Don’t, now, or I shall regret having told you. Certainly, it is a serious matter, but don’t think it more serious than it is—”

“Violet?” breathed Mrs. Mordaunt, with a long face.

“The facts are as I have stated them,” proceeded Van Hupfeldt, “and when the knowledge of them came to me, I was at some pains to make inquiries into the personality of the man in question. He turns out to be a man named Harcourt.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Harcourt, the occupier of the flat in Eddystone Mansions? Why, he was here yesterday. Violet herself told me—”

“Here? Yesterday?” Van Hupfeldt turned suddenly greenish. “But why so? What did the man say?”

“Violet did not seem to wish to be explicit,” answered Mrs. Mordaunt; “but I understood from her that he is interested in Gwendoline’s fate.”

“He? By what right does he dare? He is interested in Violet! That is whom the man is interested in, Mrs. Mordaunt, I tell you! And do you know what this man is? I have been at the pains to discover—a scribbler of books, a man of notoriously bad character who has had to fly from America—”

“How awful! But Mr. Dibbin, the agent, had references—”