Mabel heard this and liked Mark the better for it. 'I suppose he couldn't do anything else very well without making a scene,' she thought, 'but he did it very nicely. I hope that woman will find out who he is though; it will be a lesson to her!' Here Mabel was not quite fair, perhaps, for the lady had a right to her opinion, and anything is better than humbug. But she was very needlessly pitying Mark for having to listen to such unpalatable candour, little dreaming how welcome it was to him, or how grateful he felt to his critic. When Mark was free again, after an animated discussion with his candid neighbour, in which each had amused the other and both were on the way to becoming intimate, he found the spoony youth finishing the description of a new figure he had seen in a cotillon. 'You all sit down on chairs, don't you know,' he was saying, 'and then the rest come through doors;' and Mabel said, with a spice of malice (for she was being excessively bored), that that must be very pretty and original.

Mr. Langton was chatting ponderously at his end of the table, and Mrs. Langton was being interested at hers by an account the judge's lady was giving of a protege of hers, an imbecile, who made his living by calling neighbours who had to be up early.

'Perhaps it's prejudice,' said Mrs. Langton, 'but I do not think I should like to be called by an idiot; he might turn into a maniac some day. They do quite suddenly at times, don't they?' she added, appealing to the professor, 'and that wouldn't be nice, you know, if he did. What would you do?' she inquired generally.

'Shouldn't get up,' said a rising young barrister.

'I should—under the bed, and scream,' said the lively young lady he had taken down. And so for some minutes that end of the table applied itself zealously to solving the difficult problem of the proper course to take on being called early by a raving maniac.

Meanwhile Mabel had succeeded in dropping poor Mr. Pidgely and resuming conversation with Mark; this time on ordinary topics—pictures, books, theatres, and people (especially people); he talked well, and the sympathy between them increased.

Then as the dessert was being taken round, Dolly and Colin came in. 'I've had ices, Mabel,' said the latter confidentially in her ear as he passed her chair on his way to his mother; but Dolly stole quietly in and sat down by her father's side without a word.

'Do you notice any difference in my sister Dolly?' Mabel asked Mark, with a little anxious line on her forehead.

'She is not looking at all well,' said Mark, following the direction of her glance. There certainly was a change in Dolly; she had lost all her usual animation, and sat there silent and constrained, leaving the delicacies with which her father had loaded her plate untouched, and starting nervously whenever he spoke to her. When good-natured Mr. Pidgely displayed his one accomplishment of fashioning a galloping pig out of orange-peel for her amusement, she seemed almost touched by his offering, instead of slightly offended, as the natural Dolly would have been.

'I don't think she is ill,' said Mabel, 'though I was uneasy about that at first. Fraeulein and I fancy she must be worrying herself about something, but we can't get her to say what it is, and I don't like to tease her; very likely she is afraid of being laughed at if she tells anybody. But I do so wish I could find out; children can make themselves so terribly wretched over mere trifles sometimes.'

But the hour of 'bereavement,' as Mr. Du Maurier calls it, had come; gloves were being drawn on, the signal was given. Mr. Pidgely, after first carefully barricading the path on his side of the table with his chair, opened the door, and the men, left to themselves, dropped their hypocritical mask of resigned regret as the handle turned on Mrs. Langton's train, and settled down with something very like relief.

Mark, of course, could not share this, though it is to be feared that even he found some consolation in his cigarette; the sound of Mabel's voice had not ceased to ring in his ears when her father took him by the arm and led him up to be introduced to the professor, who was standing before a picture. The man of science seemed at first a little astonished at having an ordinary young man presented to him in this way, but when his host explained that Mark was the author of the book of which the professor had been speaking so highly, his manner changed, and he overwhelmed him with his courtly compliments, while the other guests gathered gradually nearer, envying the fortunate object of so marked a distinction.

But the object himself was horribly uncomfortable; for it appeared that the professor in reading 'Illusion' had been greatly struck by a brilliant simile drawn from some recent scientific discoveries with which he had had some connection, and had even discovered in some passages what he pronounced to be the germ of a striking theory that had already suggested itself to his own brain, and he was consequently very anxious to find out exactly what was in Mark's mind when he wrote. Before Mark knew where he was, he found himself let in for a scientific discussion with one of the leading authorities on the subject, while nearly everyone was listening with interest for his explanation. His forehead grew damp and cold with the horror of the situation—he almost lost his head, for he knew very little about science. Thanks, however, to his recent industry, he kept some recollection of the passages in question, and without any clear idea of what he was going to say, plunged desperately into a long and complicated explanation. He talked the wildest nonsense, but with such confidence that everyone in the room but the professor was impressed. Mark had the mortification of seeing, as the great man heard him out with a quiet dry smile, and a look in his grey eyes which he did not at all like, that he was found out. But the professor only said at the end, 'Well, that's very interesting, Mr. Ashburn, very interesting indeed—you have given me a really considerable insight into your—ah—mental process.' And for the rest of the evening he talked to his host. As he drove home with his wife that night, however, his disappointment found vent: 'Never been so taken in in my life,' he remarked; 'I did think from his book that that young Ernstone and I would have something in common; but I tried him but got nothing out of him but rubbish; probably got the whole thing up out of some British Association speech and forgotten it! I hate your shallow fellows, and 'pon my word I felt strongly inclined to show him up, only I didn't care to annoy Langton!'

'I'm glad you didn't, dear,' said his wife; 'I don't think dinner-parties are good places to show people up in, and really Mr. Ernstone, or Ashburn, whatever his name is, struck me as being so very charming—perhaps you expected too much from him.'

'H'm, I shall know better another time,' he said.

But the incident, even as it was, left Mark with an uncomfortable feeling that his evening had somehow been spoilt, particularly as he did not succeed in getting any further conversation with Mabel in the drawing-room afterwards to make him forget the unpleasantness. Vincent Holroyd's work was still proving itself in some measure an avenger of his wrongs.



CHAPTER XIX.

DOLLY'S DELIVERANCE.

About a week after the dinner recorded in the last chapter, Mark repaired to the house in Kensington Park Gardens to call as in duty bound, though, as he had not been able to find out on what afternoon he would be sure of finding Mrs. Langton at home, he was obliged to leave this to chance. He was admitted, however—not by the stately Champion, but by Colin, who had seen him from the window and hastened to intercept him.

'Mabel's at home, somewhere,' he said, 'but will you come in and speak to Dolly first? She's crying awfully about something, and she won't tell me what. Perhaps she'd tell you. And do come, sir, please; it's no fun when she's like that, and she's always doing it now!' For Colin had an unlimited belief, founded as he thought on experience, in the persuasive powers of his former master.

Mark had his doubts as to the strict propriety of acceding to this request—at all events until it had been sanctioned by some higher authority than Colin—but then he remembered Mabel's anxiety on the night of the dinner; if he could only set this child's mind at ease, would not that excuse any breach of conventionality—would it not win a word of gratitude from her sister? He could surely take a little risk and trouble for such a reward as that; and so, with his usual easy confidence, he accepted a task which was to cost him dear enough. 'You'd better leave me to manage this, young man,' he said at the door. 'Run off to your sister Mabel and explain things, tell her where I am and why, you know.' And he went into the library alone. Dolly was crouching there in an arm-chair, worn out by sobbing and the weight of a terror she dared not speak of, which had broken her down at last. Mark, who was good-natured enough in his careless way, was touched by the utter abandonment of her grief; for the first time he began to think it must be something graver than a mere childish trouble, and, apart from all personal motives, longed sincerely to do something, if he could, to restore Dolly to her old childish self. He forgot everything but that, and the unselfish sympathy he felt gave him a tact and gentleness with which few who knew him best would have credited him. Gradually, for at first she would say nothing, and turned away in lonely hopelessness, he got her to confess that she was very unhappy; that she had done something which she must never, never tell to anybody.

Then she started up with a flushed face and implored him to go away and leave her. 'Don't make me tell you!' she begged piteously. 'Oh, I know you mean to be kind, I do like you now—only I can't tell you, really. Please, please go away—I'm so afraid of telling you.'

'But why?' said Mark. 'I'm not very good myself, Dolly—you need not be afraid of me.'

'It isn't that,' said Dolly, with a shudder; 'but he said if I told anyone they would have to send me to prison.'

'Who dared to tell you a wicked lie like that?' said Mark indignantly, all the manhood in him roused by the stupid cruelty of it. 'It wasn't Colin, was it, Dolly?'

'No, not Colin; it was Harold—Harold Caffyn. Oh, Mr. Ashburn,' she said, with a sudden gleam of hope, 'wasn't it true? He said papa was a lawyer, and would have to help the law to punish me——'

'The infernal scoundrel!' muttered Mark to himself, but he saw that he was getting to the bottom of the mystery at last. 'So he told you that, did he?' he continued; 'did he say it to tease you, Dolly?'

'I don't know. He often used to tease, but never like that before, and I did do it—only I never never meant it.'

'Now listen to me, Dolly,' said Mark. 'If all you are afraid of is being sent to prison, you needn't think any more about it. You can trust me, can't you? You know I wouldn't deceive you. Well, I tell you that you can't have done anything that you would be sent to prison for—that's all nonsense. Do you understand? Harold Caffyn said that to frighten you. No one in the world would ever dream of sending you to prison, whatever you'd done. Are you satisfied now?'

Rather to Mark's embarrassment, she threw her arms round his neck in a fit of half-hysterical joy and relief. 'Tell me again,' she cried; 'you're sure it's true—they can't send me to prison? Oh, I don't care now. I am so glad you came—so glad. I will tell you all about it now. I want to!'

But some instinct kept Mark from hearing this confession; he had overcome the main difficulty—the rest was better left in more delicate hands than his, he thought. So he said, 'Never mind about telling me, Dolly; I'm sure it wasn't anything very bad. But suppose you go and find Mabel, and tell her; then you'll be quite happy again.'

'Will you come too?' asked Dolly, whose heart was now completely won.

So Mark and she went hand-in-hand to the little boudoir at the back of the house where they had had their first talk about fairies, and found Mabel in her favourite chair by the window; she looked round with a sudden increase of colour as she saw Mark.

'I mustn't stay,' he said, after shaking hands. 'I ought not to come at all, I'm afraid, but I've brought a young lady who has a most tremendous secret to confess, which she's been making herself, and you too, unhappy about all this time. She has come to find out if it's really anything so very awful after all.'

And he left them together. It was hard to go away after seeing so little of Mabel, but it was a sacrifice she was capable of appreciating.



CHAPTER XX.

A DECLARATION—OF WAR.

On the morning of the day which witnessed Dolly's happy deliverance from the terrors which had haunted her so long, Mabel had received a note from Harold Caffyn. He had something to say to her, he wrote, which could be delayed no longer—he could not be happy until he had spoken. If he were to call some time the next morning, would she see him—alone?

These words she read at first in their most obvious sense, for she had been suspecting for some time that an interview of this kind was coming, and even felt a little sorry for Harold, of whom she was beginning to think more kindly. So she wrote a few carefully worded lines, in which she tried to prepare him as much as possible for the only answer she could give, but before her letter was sent Dolly had told her story of innocent guilt.

Mabel read his note again and tore up her reply with burning cheeks. She must have misunderstood him—it could not be that; he must have felt driven to repair by confession the harm he had done. And she wrote instead—'I shall be very willing to hear anything you may have to say,' and took the note herself to the pillar-box on the hill.

Harold found her answer on returning late that night to his room, and saw nothing in it to justify any alarm. 'It's not precisely gushing,' he said to himself, 'but she couldn't very well say more just yet. I think I am pretty safe.' So the next morning he stepped from his hansom to the Langtons' door, leisurely and coolly enough. Perhaps his heart was beating a little faster, but only with excitement and anticipation of victory, for after Mabel's note he could feel no serious doubts.

He was shown into the little boudoir looking out on the square, but she was not there to receive him—she even allowed him to wait a few minutes, which amused him. 'How like a woman!' he thought. 'She can't resist keeping me on the tenterhooks a little, even now.' There was a light step outside, she had come at last, and he started to his feet as the door opened. 'Mabel!' he cried—he had meant to add 'my darling'—but something in her face warned him not to appear too sure of her yet.

She was standing at some distance from him, with one hand lightly resting on a little table; her face was paler than usual, she seemed rather to avoid looking at him, while she did not offer to take his outstretched hand. Still he was not precisely alarmed by all this. Whatever she felt, she was not the girl to throw herself at any fellow's head; she was proud and he must be humble—for the present.

'You had something to say to me—Harold?' With what a pretty shy hesitation she spoke his name now, he thought, with none of the sisterly frankness he had found so tantalising; and how delicious she was as she stood there in her fresh white morning dress. There was a delightful piquancy in this assumed coldness of hers—a woman's dainty device to delay and heighten the moment of surrender! He longed to sweep away all her pretty defences, to take her to his arms and make her own that she was his for ever. But somehow he felt a little afraid of her; he must proceed with caution. 'Yes,' he said, 'there is something I must say to you—you will give me a hearing, Mabel, won't you?'

'I told you I would hear you. I hope you will say something to make me think of you differently.'

He did not understand this exactly, but it did not sound precisely encouraging.

'I hoped you didn't think me a very bad sort of fellow,' he said. And then, as she made no answer, he plunged at once into his declaration. He was a cold lover on the stage, but practice had at least given him fluency, and now he was very much in earnest—he had never known till then all that she was to him: there was real passion in his voice, and a restrained power which might have moved her once.

But Mabel heard him to the end only because she felt unable to stop him without losing control over herself. She felt the influence of his will, but it made her the more thankful that she had so powerful a safeguard against it.

He finished and she still made no response, and he began to feel decidedly awkward; but when at last she turned her face to him, although her eyes were bright, it was not with the passion he had hoped to read there.

'And it really was that, after all!' she said bitterly. 'Do you know, I expected something very different.'

'I said what I feel. I might have said it better perhaps,' he retorted, 'but at least tell me what you expected me to say, and I will say that.'

'Yes, I will tell you. I expected an explanation.'

'An explanation!' he repeated blankly; 'of what?'

'Is there nothing you can remember which might call for some excuse if you found I had heard of it? I will give you every chance, Harold. Think—is there nothing?'

Caffyn had forgotten the stamp episode as soon as possible, as a disagreeable expedient to which he had been obliged to resort, and which had served its end, and so he honestly misunderstood this question.

'Upon my soul, no,' he said earnestly. 'I don't pretend to have been any better than my neighbours, but since I began to think of you, I never cared about any other woman. If you've been told any silly gossip——'

Mabel laughed, but not merrily. 'Oh, it is not that—really it did not occur to me to be jealous at any time—especially now. Harold, Dolly has told me everything about that letter,' she added, as he still looked doubtful.

He understood now at all events, and took a step back as if to avoid a blow. Everything! his brain seemed dulled for an instant by those words; he thought that he had said enough to prevent the child from breathing a syllable about that unlucky letter, and now Mabel knew 'everything!'

But he recovered his power of thought almost directly, feeling that this was no time to lose his head. 'I suppose I'm expected to show some emotion,' he said lightly; 'it's evidently something quite too terrible. But I'm afraid I want an explanation this time.'

'I think not, but you shall have it. I know that you came in and found that poor child tearing off the stamp from some old envelope of mine, and had the wickedness to tell her she had been stealing. Do you deny it?'

'Some old envelope!' The worst of Caffyn's fear vanished when he heard that. She did not know that it contained an unread letter then; she did not guess—how could she, when Dolly herself did not know it—where the letter had come from. He might appease her yet!

Caffyn's first inference, it may be said, was correct; in Dolly's mind her guilt had consisted in stealing a marked stamp, and her hurried and confused confession had, quite innocently and unconsciously, left Mabel ignorant of the real extent and importance of what seemed to her a quite imaginary offence.

'Deny it!' he said, 'of course not; I remember joking her a little over something of the sort. Is that all this tremendous indignation is about—a joke?'

'A joke!' she said indignantly; 'you will not make anyone but yourself merry over jokes like that. You set to work deliberately to frighten her; you did it so thoroughly that she has been wretched for days and days, ill and miserable with the dread of being sent to prison. You did threaten her with a prison, Harold; you told her she must even be afraid of her own father—of all of us.... Who can tell what she has been suffering, all alone, my poor little Dolly! And you dare to call that a joke!'

'I never thought she would take it all so literally,' he said.

'Oh, you are not stupid, Harold; only a cruel fool could have thought he was doing no harm. And you have seen her since again and again; you must have noticed how changed she was, and yet you had no pity on her! Can't you really see what a thing you have been doing? Do you often amuse yourself in that way, and with children?'

'Hang it, Mabel,' said Caffyn uneasily, 'you're very hard on me!'

'Why were you hard on my darling Dolly?' Mabel demanded. 'What had she done to you—how could you find pleasure in torturing her? Do you hate children—or only Dolly?'

He made a little gesture of impatient helplessness. 'Oh, if you mean to go on asking questions like that—' he said, 'of course I don't hate your poor little sister. I tell you I'm sorry she took it seriously—very sorry. And—and, if there's anything I can do to make it up to her somehow; any—any amends, you know——'

The hardship, as he felt at the time, of his peculiar position was that it obliged him to offer such a lame excuse for his treatment of Dolly. Without the motive he had had for his conduct, it must seem dictated by some morbid impulse of cruelty—whereas, of course, he had acted quite dispassionately, under the pressure of a necessity—which, however, it was impossible to explain to Mabel.

'I suppose "amends" mean caramels or chocolates,' said Mabel; 'chocolates to compensate for making a child shrink for days from those who loved her! She was fretting herself ill, and we could do nothing for her: a very little more and it might have killed her. Perhaps your sense of humour would have been satisfied by that? If it had not been for a friend—almost a stranger—who was able to see what we were all blind to, that a coward had been practising on her fears, we might never have guessed the truth till—till it was too late!'

'I see now,' he said; 'I thought there must be someone at the bottom of this; someone who, for purposes of his own, has contrived to put things in the worst light for me. If you can condescend to listen to slanderers, Mabel, I shall certainly not condescend to defend myself.'

'Oh, I will tell you his name,' she said, 'and then even you will have to own that he had no motive for doing what he did but natural goodness and kindness. I doubt even if he has ever met you in his life; the man who rescued our Dolly from what you had made her is Mr. Mark Ashburn, the author of 'Illusion' (her expression softened slightly, from the gratitude she felt, as she spoke his name, and Caffyn noted it). 'If you think he would stoop to slander you—— But what is the use of talking like that? You have owned it all. No slander could make it any worse than it is!'

'If you think as badly of me as that,' said Caffyn, who had grown deadly pale, 'we can meet no more, even as acquaintances.'

'That would be my own wish,' she replied.

'Do you mean,' he asked huskily, 'that—that everything is to be over between us? Has it really come to that, Mabel?'

'I did not know that there ever was anything between us, as you call it,' she said. 'But of course, after this, friendship is impossible. We cannot help meeting. I shall not even tell my mother of this, for Dolly's sake, and so this house will still be open to you. But if you force me to protect Dolly or myself, you will come here no more.'

Her scornful indifference only filled him with a more furious desire to triumph over it; he had felt so secure of her that morning, and now she had placed this immeasurable distance between them. He had never felt the full power of her beauty till then, as she stood there with that haughty pose of the head and the calm contempt in her eyes; he had seen her in most moods—playfully perverse, coldly civil, and unaffectedly gracious and gentle—and in none of them had she made his heart ache with the mad passion that mastered him now.

'It shall not end like this!' he said violently; 'I won't let you make a mountain of a molehill in this way, Mabel, because it suits you to do so. You have no right to judge me by what a child chooses to imagine I said!'

'I judge you by the effects of what you did say. I can remember very well that you had a cruel tongue as a boy—you are quite able to torture a child with it still.'

'It is your tongue that is cruel!' he retorted; 'but you shall be just to me. I love you, Mabel—whether you like it or not—you shall not throw me off like this. Do you hear? You liked me well enough before all this! I will force you to think better of me; you shall own it one day. No, I'm mad to talk like this—I only ask you to forgive me—to let me hope still!'

He came forward as he spoke and tried to take her hands, but she put them quickly behind her. 'Don't dare to come nearer!' she said; 'I thought I had made you feel something of what I think of you. What can I say more? Hope! do you think I could ever trust a man capable of such deliberate wickedness as you have shown by that single action?—a kind of malice that I hardly think can be human. No, you had better not hope for that. As for forgiving you, I can't even do that now; some day, perhaps, when Dolly has quite forgotten, I may be able to forget too, but not till then. Have I made you understand yet? Is that enough?'

Caffyn was still standing where she had checked his advance; his face was very grey and drawn, and his eyes were fixed on the Eastern rug at his feet. He gave a short savage laugh. 'Well, yes,' he said, 'I think perhaps I have had enough at last. You have been kind enough to put your remarks very plainly. I hope, for your own sake, I may never have a chance of making you any return for all this.'

'I hope so too,' she said; 'I think you would use it.'

'Thanks for your good opinion,' he said, as he went to the door. 'I shall do my best, if the time comes, to deserve it.'

She had never faltered during the whole of this interview. A righteous anger had given her courage to declare all the scorn and indignation she felt. But now, as the front door closed upon him, the strength that had sustained her so long gave way all at once; she sank trembling into one of the low cushioned chairs, and presently the reaction completed itself in tears, which she had not quite repressed when Dolly came in to look for her.

'Has he gone?' she began; and then, as she saw her sister's face, 'Mabel! Harold hasn't been bullying you?'

'No, darling, no,' said Mabel, putting her arms round Dolly's waist. 'It's silly of me to cry, isn't it? for Harold will not trouble either of us again after this.'

* * * * *

Meanwhile Harold was striding furiously down the other side of the hill in the direction of Kensal Green, paying very little heed where his steps might be leading him, in the dull rage which made his brain whirl.

Mabel's soft and musical voice, for it had not ceased to be that, even when her indignation was at its highest, rang still in his ears. He could not forget her bitter scornful speeches; they were lashing and stinging him to the soul.

He had indeed been hoist with his own petard; the very adroitness with which he had contrived to get rid of an inconvenient rival had only served to destroy his own chances for ever.

He knew that never again would Mabel suffer him to approach her on the old friendly footing—it would be much if she could bring herself to treat him with ordinary civility—he had lost her for ever, and hated her accordingly from the bottom of his heart. 'If I can ever humble you as you have humbled me to-day, God help you, my charming Mabel!' he said to himself. 'To think that that little fool of a child should have let out everything, at the very moment when I had the game in my own hands! I have to thank that distinguished novelist, Mr. Mark Ashburn, for that, though; he must trouble himself to put his spoke in my wheel, must he? I shan't forget it. I owe you one for that, my illustrious friend, and you're the sort of creditor I generally do pay in the long run.'

Only one thing gave him a gleam—not of comfort, precisely, but gloomy satisfaction; his manoeuvre with the letter had at least succeeded in keeping Holroyd apart from Mabel. 'He's just the fellow to think he's jilted, and give her up without another line,' he thought; 'shouldn't wonder if he married out there. Miss Mabel won't have everything her own way!'

He walked on, past the huge gasometers and furnaces of the Gas Company, and over the railway and canal bridges, to the Harrow Road, when he turned mechanically to the right. His eyes saw nothing—neither the sluggish barges gliding through the greasy black stream on his right, nor the doleful string of hearses and mourning coaches which passed him on their way to or from the cemetery. It was with some surprise that, as he began to take note of his surroundings again, he found himself in Bayswater, and not far from his own rooms. He thought he might as well return to them as not, and as he reached the terrace in which he had taken lodgings, he saw a figure coming towards him that seemed familiar, and in whom, as he drew nearer, he recognised his uncle, Mr. Antony Humpage. He was in no mood to talk about indifferent topics just then, and if his respected uncle had only had his back instead of his face towards him, Caffyn would have made no great effort to attract his attention. As it was, he gave him the heartiest and most dutiful of welcomes. 'You don't mean to say you've actually been looking me up?' he began; 'how lucky that I came up just then—another second or two and I should have missed you. Come in, and let me give you some lunch?'

'No, my boy, I can't stay long. I was in the neighbourhood on business, and I thought I'd see if you were at home. I won't come up again now, I must get back to my station. I waited for some time in those luxurious apartments of yours, you see, thinking you might come in. Suppose you walk a little way back with me, eh? if you've no better engagement.'

'Couldn't have a better one,' said Caffyn, inwardly chafing; but he always made a point of obliging his uncle, and for once he had no reason to consider his time thrown away. For, as they walked on together in the direction of the Edgware Road, where the old gentleman intended to take the Underground to King's Cross, Mr. Humpage, after some desultory conversation on various subjects, said suddenly, 'By the way, you know a good many of these writing fellows, Harold—have you ever come across one called Mark Ashburn?'

'I've met him once,' said Caffyn, and his brows contracted. 'Wrote this new book, "Illusion," didn't he?'

'Yes, he did—confound him!' said the other warmly, and then launched into the history of his wrongs. 'Perhaps I oughtn't to say it at my age,' he concluded, 'but I hate that fellow!'

'Do you though?' said Caffyn with a laugh; 'it's a singular coincidence, but so do I.'

'There's something wrong about him, too,' continued the old man; 'he's got a secret.'

('So have most of us!' thought his nephew.) 'But what makes you think so?' he asked aloud, and waited for the answer with some interest.

'I saw it in the fellow's face; no young man with a clear record ever has such a look as he had when I came in. He was green with fear, sir; perfectly green!'

'Is that all?' and Caffyn was slightly disappointed. 'You know, I don't think much of that. He might have taken you for a dun, or an indignant parent, or something of that sort; he may be one of those nervous fellows who start at anything, and you came there on purpose to give him a rowing, didn't you?'

'Don't talk to me,' said the old man impatiently; 'there's not much nervousness about him—he's as cool and impudent a rascal as ever I saw when he's nothing to fear. It was guilt, sir, guilt. You remember that picture of the Railway Station, and the look on the forger's face when the detectives lay hold of him at the carriage door? I saw that very look on young Ashburn's face before I'd spoken a dozen words.'

'What were the words?' said Caffyn. 'Proceed, good uncle, as we say in our profession; you interest me much!'

'I'm sure I forget what I said—I was out of temper, I remember that. I think I began by asking him for the real name of the author of the book.'

Again Caffyn was disappointed. 'Of course he was in a funk then; he knew he had put you into it. So you say at least; I've not read the book myself.'

'It wasn't that at all, I tell you,' persisted the old man obstinately; 'you weren't there, and I was. D'ye think I don't know better than you? He's not the man to care for that. When he found what I'd really come about he was cool enough. No, no, he's robbed, or forged, or something, at some time or other, take my word for it—and I only hope I shall live to see it brought home to him!'

'I hope it will find him at home when it is,' said Caffyn; 'these things generally find the culprits "out" in more senses than one, to use an old Joe Miller. He would look extremely well in the Old Bailey dock. But this is Utopian, Uncle.'

'Well—we shall see. I turn off here, so good-bye. If you meet that libelling scoundrel again, you remember what I've told you.'

'Yes, I will,' thought Caffyn as he walked back alone. 'I must know more of my dear Ashburn; and if there happens to be a screw loose anywhere in my dear Ashburn's past, I shall do my humble best to give it a turn or two. It's a charming amusement to unmask the perfidious villain, as I suppose I must call myself after to-day, but it was hardly safe to do it if he has his reasons for wearing a domino himself. If I could only think that excellent uncle of mine had not found a mare's nest! And if I can only put that screw on!'



CHAPTER XXI.

A PARLEY WITH THE ENEMY.

Mr. Fladgate was one of those domestically inclined bachelors who are never really at ease in rooms or chambers, and whose tastes lead them, as soon as they possess the necessary means, to set up a substantial and well-regulated household of their own. He had a large old-fashioned house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square, where he entertained rather frequently in a solid unpretentious fashion. At his Sunday dinners especially, one or two of the minor celebrities of the day were generally to be met, and it was to one of these gatherings that Mark was invited, as one of the natural consequences of the success of 'Illusion.' He found himself, on arriving, in company with several faces familiar to him from photographs, and heard names announced which were already common property. There were some there who had been famous once and were already beginning to be forgotten, others now obscure who were destined to be famous some day, and a few, and these by no means the least gifted, who neither had been nor would be famous at any time. There were two or three constellations of some magnitude on this occasion, surrounded by a kind of 'milky way' of minor stars, amongst which the bar, the studios, and the stage were all more or less represented.

Mark, as a rising man who had yet to justify a first success, occupied a position somewhere between the greater and lesser division, and Mr. Fladgate took care to make him known to many of the leading men in the room, by whom he found himself welcomed with cordial encouragement.

Presently, when he had shifted for a moment out of the nearest focus of conversation, his host, who had been 'distributing himself,' as the French say, amongst the various knots of talkers, came bustling up to him. 'Er—Mr. Ashburn,' he began, 'I want you to know a very clever young fellow here—known him from a boy—he's on the stage now, and going to surprise us all some of these days. You'll like him. Come along and I'll introduce him to you; he's very anxious to know you.' And when Mark had followed him as he threaded his way across the room, he found himself hurriedly introduced to the man with the cold light eyes whom he had met at the Featherstones' on the day when he had recognised Mabel Langton's portrait. Mr. Fladgate had already bustled away again, and the two were left together in a corner of the room. Dolly's revelations of the terrorism this man had exercised over her had strengthened the prejudice and dislike Mark had felt on their first meeting; he felt angry and a little uncomfortable now, at being forced to come in contact with him, but there was no way of avoiding it just then, and Caffyn himself was perfectly at his ease.

'I think we have met before—at Grosvenor Place,' he began blandly; 'but I dare say you have forgotten.'

'No,' said Mark, 'I remember you very well; and besides,' he added, with a significance that he hoped would not be thrown away, 'I have been hearing a good deal about you lately from the Langtons—from Miss Langton, that is.'

'Ah!' said Caffyn; 'that would be flattering to most men, but when one has the bad luck, like myself, to displease such a very impulsive young lady as Miss Langton, the less she mentions you the better.'

'I may as well say,' returned Mark coldly, 'that, as to that particular affair in which you were concerned, whatever my opinions are, I formed them without assistance.'

'And you don't care to have them unsettled again by any plea for the defence? That's very natural. Well, with Miss Langton's remarks to guide me, I think I can guess what your own opinion of me is likely to be just now. And I'm going to ask you, as a mere matter of fair play, to hear my side of the question. You think that's very ridiculous, of course?'

'I think we can do no good by discussing it any farther,' said Mark; 'we had better let the matter drop.'

'But you see,' urged Caffyn, 'as it is, the matter has dropped—on me, and really I do think that you, who I understand were the means—of course from the best possible motives—of exposing me as a designing villain, might give me an opportunity of defending myself. I took the liberty of getting Fladgate to bring us together, expressly because I can't be comfortable while I know you have your present impressions of me. I don't expect to persuade Miss Langton to have a little charity—she's a woman; but I hoped you at least would give me a hearing.'

Mark felt some of his prejudice leaving him already; Caffyn had not the air of a man who had been detected in a course of secret tyranny. There was something flattering, too, in his evident wish to recover Mark's good opinion; he certainly ought to hear both sides before judging so harshly. Perhaps, after all, they had been making a little too much of this business. 'Well,' he said at last, 'I should be very glad if I could think things were not as bad as they seem. I will hear anything you would like to say about it.'

'Quite the high moral censor,' thought the other savagely. 'Confound his condescension!'

'I was sure you would give me a chance of putting myself right,' he said, 'but I can't do it now. They're going down to dinner; we will talk it over afterwards.'

At dinner conversation was lively and well sustained, though perhaps not quite so sparkling as might have been expected from such an assembly. As a rule, those who talked most and best were the men who still had their reputation to make, and many of the great men there seemed content to expose themselves to such brilliancy as there was around them, as if silently absorbing it for future reproduction, by some process analogous to the action of luminous paint.

Caffyn was placed at some distance from Mark, and as, after dinner, he was entreated to sit down to the piano, which stood in a corner of the room to which they had adjourned for cigars and coffee, it was some time before their conversation was resumed.

Caffyn was at his best as he sat there rippling out snatches of operatic morceaux, and turning round with a smile to know if they were recognised. His performance was not remarkable for accuracy, as he had never troubled himself to study music, or anything else, seriously, but it was effective enough with a non-critical audience; his voice, too, when he sang, though scarcely strong enough to fill a room of much larger size, was pleasant and not untrained, and it was some time before he was permitted to leave the music-stool.

He rattled off a rollicking hunting song, full of gaiety and verve, and followed it up with a little pathetic ballad, sung with an accent of real feeling (he could throw more emotion into his singing than his acting), while, although it was after dinner, the room was hushed until the last notes had died away, and when he rose at length with a laughing plea of exhaustion, he was instantly surrounded by a buzz of genuine gratitude. Mark heard all this, and the last remnants of his dislike and distrust vanished; it seemed impossible that this man, with the sympathetic voice, and the personal charm which was felt by most of those present, could be capable of finding pleasure in working on a child's terrors. So that when Caffyn, disengaging himself at length from the rest, made his way to where Mark was sitting, the latter felt this almost as a distinction, and made room for him with cordiality. Somebody was at the piano again, but as all around were talking, the most confidential conversations could be carried on in perfect security, and Caffyn, seating himself next to Mark, set himself to remove all prejudices.

He put his case very well, without obsequiousness or temper, appealing to Mark as a fellow man-of-the-world against a girl's rash judgment. 'You know,' he said, in the course of his arguments, 'I'm not really an incarnate fiend in private life. Miss Langton is quite convinced I am. I believe I saw her looking suspiciously at my boots the other day; but then she's a trifle hard on me. My worst fault is that I don't happen to understand children. I'd got into a way of saying extravagant things; you know the way one does talk rubbish to children; well, of joking in that sort of way with little What's-her-name. She always seemed to understand it well enough, and I should have thought she was old enough to see the simpler kind of joke, at all events. One day I chanced to chaff her about a stamp she took off some envelope. Well, I daresay I said something about stealing and prisons, all in fun, of course, never dreaming she would think any more about it. A fortnight afterwards, suddenly there's a tremendous hullabaloo. You began it. Oh, I know it was natural enough, but you did begin it. You see the child looking pale and seedy, and say at once, "something on her mind." Well, I don't know, and she might have been such a little idiot as to take a chance word au grand serieux; it might have been something else on her mind; or she mightn't have had anything on her mind at all. Anyway, she tells you a long story about prisons, and how one Harold Caffyn had told her she would go there, and so on, and you, with that vivid imagination of yours, conjure up a tearful picture of a diabolical young man (me, you know) coldly gloating over the terrors of a poor little innocent ignorant child, eh? (Miss Dolly's nearly ten, and anything but backward for her age; but that's of no consequence.) Well, then you go and impart some of your generous indignation to Miss Langton; she takes it in a very aggravated form, and gives it to me. Upon my word, I think I've had rather hard lines!'

Mark really felt a little remorseful just then, but he made one more attempt to maintain his high ground. 'I don't know that I should have thought so much of the joke itself,' he said, 'but you carried it on so long; you saw her brooding over it and getting worse and worse, and yet you never said a word to undeceive the poor child!'

'Now, you know, with all respect to you, Ashburn,' said Caffyn, who was gradually losing all ceremony, 'that about seeing her brooding is rubbish—pure rubbish! I saw the child, I suppose, now and again; but I didn't notice her particularly, and if I had, I don't exactly know how to detect the signs of brooding. How do you tell it from indigestion? and how are you to guess what the brooding is about? I tell you I'd forgotten the whole thing. And that was what all your righteous wrath was based upon, was it? Well, it's very delightful, no doubt, to figure as a knight-errant, or a champion, and all that kind of thing—particularly when you make your own dragon—but when you come prancing down and spit some unlucky lizard, it's rather a cheap triumph. But there, I forgive you. You've made a little mistake which has played the very deuce with me at Kensington Park Gardens. It's too late to alter that now, and if I can only make you see that there has been a mistake, and I'm not one of the venomous sort of reptiles after all, why, I suppose I must be content with that!'

He succeeded in giving Mark an uneasy impression that he had made a fool of himself. He had quite lost the feeling of superiority under the tone of half-humorous, half-bitter remonstrance which Caffyn had chosen to take, and was chiefly anxious now to make the other forget his share in the matter. 'Perhaps I was too ready to put the worst construction on what I heard,' he said apologetically, 'but after what you've told me, why——'

'Well, we'll say no more about it,' said Caffyn; 'you understand me now, and that's all I cared about.' ('You may be a great genius, my friend,' he was thinking, 'but it's not so very difficult to get round you, after all!') 'Look here,' he continued, 'will you come and see me one of these days—it would be a great kindness to me. I've got rooms in Kremlin Road, Bayswater, No. 72.'

Mark changed countenance very slightly as he heard the address—it had been Holroyd's. There was nothing in that to alarm him, and yet he could not resist a superstitious terror at the coincidence. Caffyn noticed the effect directly. 'Do you know Kremlin Road?' he said.

Something made Mark anxious to explain the emotion he felt he had given way to. 'Yes,' he said, 'a—a very old friend of mine had lodgings at that very house. He was lost at sea, so when you mentioned the place I——'

'I see,' said Caffyn. 'Of course. Was your friend Vincent Holroyd, I wonder?'

'You knew him?' cried Mark; 'you!'

('Got the Railway Station effect that time!' thought Caffyn. 'I begin to believe my dear uncle touched a weak spot after all. If he has a secret, it's ten to one Holroyd knew it—knows it, by Jove!')

'Oh, yes, I knew poor old Holroyd,' he said; 'that's how I came to take his rooms. Sad thing, his going down like that, wasn't it? It must have been a great shock for you—I can see you haven't got over it even yet.'

'No,' stammered Mark, 'no—yes, I felt it a great deal. I—I didn't know you were a friend of his, too; did—did you know him well?'

'Very well; in fact I don't fancy he had any secrets from me.'

Like lightning the thought flashed across Mark's mind, what if Caffyn had been entrusted with Holroyd's literary projects? But he remembered the next moment that Holroyd had expressly said that he had never told a soul of his cherished work until that last evening in Rotten Row. Caffyn had lied, but with a purpose, and as the result confirmed his suspicions he changed the subject, and was amused at Mark's evident relief.

Towards the end of the evening Mr. Fladgate came up in his amiable way and laid his hand jocularly on Caffyn's shoulder. 'Let me give you a word of advice,' he said laughing; 'don't talk to Mr. Ashburn here about his book.'

'Shouldn't presume to,' said Caffyn. 'But do you come down so heavily on ignorant admiration, Ashburn, eh?'

'Oh, it isn't that,' said Mr. Fladgate; 'it's his confounded modesty. I shall be afraid to tell him when we think about bringing out another edition. I really believe he'd like never to hear of it again!'

Mark felt himself flush. 'Come,' he said, with a nervous laugh, 'I'm not so bad as all that!'

'Oh, you're beginning to stand fire better. But (it's such a good story you must let me tell it, Mr. Ashburn, particularly as it only does you credit). Well, he was so ashamed of having it known that he was the author of "Illusion," that he actually took the trouble to get the manuscript all copied out in a different hand! Thought he'd take me in that way, but he didn't. No, no, as you young fellows say, I "spotted" him directly; eh, Mr. Ashburn?'

'I'm afraid it's time for me to be off,' said Mark, dreading further revelations, and too nervous to see that they could do him no possible harm. But the fact was, Caffyn's presence filled him with a vague alarm which he could not shake off.

Good-natured Mr. Fladgate was afraid he had offended him. 'I do hope you weren't annoyed at my mentioning that about the manuscript?' he said, as he accompanied Mark to the door. 'It struck me as so curious, considering the success the book has had, that I really couldn't resist telling it.'

'No, no,' said Mark, 'it's all right; I didn't mind in the least. I—I'm not ashamed of it!'

'Why, of course not,' said his host; 'it will be something for your biographer to record, eh? You won't have another cigar to take you home? Well, good-night.'

'Good-night,' said Mark, and added some words of thanks for a pleasant evening.

Had he had such a pleasant evening? he asked himself, as he walked home alone in the warm night air. He had been well treated by everybody, and there had been men present whose attention was a distinction in itself, and yet he felt an uneasiness which he found it difficult to trace back to any particular cause. He decided at last that he was annoyed to find that the casual mention of Holroyd's name should still have power to discompose him—that was a weakness which he must set himself to overcome.

At the same time no one could possibly discover his secret; there was no harm done. And before he reached his lodgings, he decided that the evening had been pleasant enough.



CHAPTER XXII.

STRIKING THE TRAIL.

It was Sunday once more—a bright morning in June—and Caffyn was sitting over his late breakfast and the 'Observer' in his rooms at Bayswater. He was in a somewhat gloomy and despondent frame of mind, for nothing seemed to have gone well with him since his disastrous reception in Mabel's boudoir. His magnificent prospects in commerce had suddenly melted away into thin air, for his confiding friend and intending partner had very inconsiderately developed symptoms of a premature insanity, and was now 'under restraint.' He himself was in debt to a considerable extent; his father had firmly refused to increase what in his opinion was a handsome allowance; and Caffyn had been obliged to go to a theatrical agent with a view of returning to the boards, while no opening he thought it worth his while to accept had as yet presented itself.

Mabel had not relented in the least. He had met her once or twice at the Featherstones' and, although she had not treated him with any open coolness, he felt that henceforth there must be an impassable barrier between them. Now and then, even while she forced herself in public to listen to him, the invincible horror and repugnance she felt would be suddenly revealed by a chance look or intonation—and he saw it and writhed in secret. And yet he went everywhere that there was a possibility of meeting her, with a restless impulse of self-torture, while his hate grew more intense day by day.

And all this he owed to Mark Ashburn—a fact which Harold Caffyn was not the man to forget. He had been careful to cultivate him, had found out his address and paid him one or two visits, in which he had managed to increase the intimacy between them.

Mark was now entirely at his ease with him. His air of superiority had been finally dropped on the evening of Mr. Fladgate's dinner, and he seemed flattered by the assiduity with which Caffyn courted his society. Still, if he had a secret, it was his own still. Caffyn watched in vain for the look of sudden terror which he had once succeeded in surprising. At times he began to fear that it was some involuntary nervous contraction from which his own hopes had led him to infer the worst, for he was aware that countenances are not always to be depended upon; that a nervous temperament will sometimes betray all the signs of guilt from the mere consciousness that guilt is suspected. If that was the case here, he felt himself powerless. It is only in melodramas that a well-conducted person can be steeped in crime, and he did not see his way very clearly to accomplishing that difficult and dangerous feat with Mark Ashburn.

So he hated Mark more intensely at the thought that, after all, his past might be a blameless one. But even if this were not so, and he had a secret after all, it might be long enough before some fortunate chance gave Caffyn the necessary clue to it. Well, he would wait and watch as patiently as he might till then, and however long the opportunity might be in coming, when it came at last it should not find him too indifferent or reluctant to make use of it.

While he thought out his position somewhat to this effect, his landlady appeared to clear away the breakfast things; she was a landlady of the better class, a motherly old soul who prided herself upon making her lodgers comfortable, and had higher views than many of her kind on the subjects of cookery and attendance. She had come to entertain a great respect for Caffyn, although at first, when she had discovered that he was 'one of them play-actors,' she had not been able to refrain from misgivings. Her notions of actors were chiefly drawn from the ramping and roaring performers at minor theatres, and the seedy blue-chinned individuals she had observed hanging about their stage-doors; and the modern comedian was altogether beyond her experience.

So when she found that her new lodger was 'quite the gentleman, and that partickler about his linen, and always civil and pleasant-spoken, and going about as neat as a new pin, and yet with a way about him as you could see he wouldn't stand no nonsense,' her prejudices were entirely conquered.

'Good morning, Mr. Caffyn, sir,' she began; 'I come up to clear away your breakfast, if you're quite done. Sarah Ann she's gone to chapel, which she's a Primitive Methodist, she says, though she can't never tell me so much as the text when she come back, and I tell her, "My good gal," I ses to her, "what do you go to chapel for?" and it's my belief that as often as not she don't go near it. But there, Mr. Caffyn, if a gal does her work about the 'ouse of a week, as I will say for Sarah Ann——'

Caffyn groaned. Good Mrs. Binney had a way of coming in to discourse on things in general, and it was always extremely difficult to get rid of her. She did not run down on this occasion until after an exhaustive catalogue, a la Mrs. Lirriper, of the manners and customs of a whole dynasty of maids-of-all-work, when she began to clear his breakfast-table. He was congratulating himself on her final departure, when she returned with a bundle of papers in her hand. 'I've been meanin' to speak to you about these, this ever such a time,' she said. 'Binney, he said as I'd better, seeing as you've got his very rooms, and me not liking to burn 'em, and the maids that careless about papers and that, and not a line from him since he left.'

'It would certainly be better not to burn the rooms, unless they're insured, Mrs. Binney, and I should be inclined to prefer their not being burnt while I'm in them, unless you make a point of it,' said Caffyn mildly.

'Lor, Mr. Caffyn, who was talking of burnin' rooms? You do talk so ridiklus. It's these loose papers of Mr. 'Olroyd's as I came to speak to you about, you bein' a friend of his, and they lyin' a burden on my mind for many a day, and litterin' up all the place, and so afraid I am as Sarah Ann'll take and light the fire with 'em one of these mornings, and who knows whether they're not of value, and if so what should I say if he came and asked me for 'em back again?'

'Well, he won't do that, Mrs. Binney, if it's true that he was drowned in the "Mangalore," will he?'

'Drowned! and me never to hear it till this day. It's quite took me aback. Poor dear gentleman, what an end for him—to go out all that way only to be drowned! I do seem to be told of nothing but deaths and dying this morning, for Binney's just 'eard that poor old Mr. Tapling, at No. 5 opposite, was took off at last quite sudden late last night, and he'd had a dropsy for years, and swell up he would into all manner o' shapes as I've seen him doin' of it myself!'

'Well, I'll look over the papers for you, Mrs. Binney,' interrupted Caffyn. 'I don't suppose there's anything of much importance, but I can tell you what ought to be kept.' He would have solved her difficulties by advising her to burn the whole of them, but for some vague idea that he might be able to discover something amongst all these documents which would throw some light upon Holroyd's relations with Mark.

So when Mrs. Binney was at last prevailed on to leave him in peace, he sat down with the sheaf of miscellaneous papers she had left him, and began to examine them without much hope of discovering anything to the purpose.

They seemed to be the accumulations of some years. There were rough drafts of Latin and Greek verses, outlines for essays, and hasty jottings of University and Temple lectures—memorials of Holroyd's undergraduate and law-student days. Then came notes scribbled down in court with a blunt corroded quill on borrowed scraps of paper, and elaborate analyses of leading cases and Acts of Parliament, which belonged to the period of zeal which had followed his call to the Bar.

He turned all these over carelessly enough, until he came upon some sheets fastened together with a metal clip. 'This does not look like law,' he said half aloud. '"Glamour—romance by Vincent Beauchamp." Beauchamp was his second name, I think. So he wrote romances, did he, poor devil! This looks like the scaffolding for one, anyway; let's have a look at it. List of characters: Beaumelle Marston; I've come across that name somewhere lately, I know; Lieutenant-Colonel Duncombe; why, I know that gentleman, too! Was this ever published? Here's the argument.' He read and re-read it carefully, and then went to a bookshelf and took down a book with the Grosvenor Library label; it was a copy of 'Illusion,' by Cyril Ernstone.

With that by his side he turned over the rest of Holroyd's papers, and found more traces of some projected literary work; skeleton scenes, headings for chapters, and even a few of the opening pages, with some marginal alterations in red ink, all of which he eagerly compared with the printed work before him.

Then he rose and paced excitedly up and down his room. 'Is this his secret?' he thought. 'If I could only be sure of it! It seems too good to be true ... they might have collaborated, or the other might have made him a present of a plot, or even borrowed some notions from him.... And yet there are some things that look uncommonly suspicious. Why should he look so odd at the mere mention of Holroyd's name? Why did he get the manuscript recopied? Was it modesty—or something else? And why does one name only appear on the title-page, and our dear friend take all the credit to himself? There's something fishy about it all, and I mean to get at it. Job was perfectly correct. It is rash for an enemy to put his name to a book—especially some other fellow's book. Mr. Mark Ashburn and I must have a little private conversation together, in which I shall see how much I remember of the action of the common pump.'

He sat down and wrote a genial little note, asking Mark, if he had no better engagement, to come round and dine quietly with him at the house in Kremlin Road that evening, gave it to his landlord with directions to take a cab to Mark's rooms, and if he could, bring back an answer, after which he waited patiently for his messenger's return.

Binney returned in the course of an hour or so, having found Mark in, and brought a note which Caffyn tore open impatiently. 'I have a friend coming to dinner to-night, Mr. Binney,' he said, turning round with his pleasant smile when he had read the answer. 'It's Sunday, I know, but Mrs. Binney won't mind for once, and tell her she must do her very best; I want to give my friend a little surprise.'



CHAPTER XXIII.

PIANO PRACTICE.

Caffyn was conscious of a certain excitement that Sunday evening as he waited for Mark Ashburn's arrival. He felt that he might be standing on the threshold of a chamber containing the secret of the other's life—the key of which that very evening might deliver into his hands. He was too cautious to jump at hasty conclusions; he wished before deciding upon any plan of action to be practically certain of his facts; a little skilful manipulation, however, would most probably settle the question one way or the other, and if the result verified his suspicions he thought he would know how to make use of his advantage. There is a passage in the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table' where the author, in talking of the key to the side-door by which every person's feelings may be entered, goes on to say, 'If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that justice utters over its doomed victims, "The Lord have mercy on your soul!"' There, it is true, the key in question unlocks the delicate instrument of the nervous system, and not necessarily a Bluebeard's chamber of guilt; but where the latter is also the case to some extent the remark by no means loses in significance, and if any man had the torturing instinct to perfection, Caffyn might be said to be that individual. There was nothing he would enjoy more than practising upon a human piano and putting it hopelessly out of tune; but pleasant as this was, he felt he might have to exercise some self-denial here, at all events for the present, lest his instrument should become restive and escape before he had quite made up his mind what air he could best play upon it.

In the meantime Mark was preparing to keep the appointment in the pleasantest and most unsuspecting frame of mind. After answering Caffyn's note he had met the Langtons as they came out of church and returned with them to lunch. Dolly was herself again now, her haunting fears forgotten with the happy ease of childhood, and Mabel had made Mark feel something of the gratitude she felt to him for his share in bringing this about. He had gone on to one or two other houses, and had been kindly received everywhere, and now he was looking forward to a quiet little dinner with the full expectation of a worthy finish to a pleasant day. Even when he mounted the stairs of the house which had been once familiar to him, and stood in Holroyd's old rooms, he was scarcely affected by any unpleasant associations. For one thing, he was beginning to have his conscience tolerably well in hand; for another, the interior of the rooms was completely transformed since he had seen them last.

Then they were simply the furnished apartments of a man who cared but little for his personal well-being; now, when he passed round the handsome Japanese screen by the door, he saw an interior marked by a studied elegance and luxury. The common lodging-house fireplace was concealed by an elaborate oak over-mantel, with brass plaques and blue china; the walls were covered with a delicate blue-green paper and hung with expensive etchings and autotype drawings of an aesthetically erotic character; small tables and deep luxurious chairs were scattered about, and near the screen stood a piano and a low stand with peacock's feathers arranged in a pale blue crackle jar. In spite of the pipes and riding-whips on the racks, the place was more like a woman's boudoir than a man's room, and there were traces in its arrangements of an eye to effect which gave it the air of a well-staged scene in a modern comedy.

It looked very attractive, softly lit as it was by shaded candles in sconces and a porcelain lamp with a crimson shade, which was placed on the small oval table near the fern-filled fireplace; and as Mark placed himself in a low steamer chair and waited for his host to make his appearance, he felt as if he was going to enjoy himself.

'I shall have my rooms done up something in this way,' he thought, 'when my book comes out.' The blinds were half drawn and the windows opened wide to the sultry air, and while he waited he could hear the bells from neighbouring steeples calling in every tone, from harsh command to persuasive invitation, to the evening services.

Presently Caffyn lounged in through the hangings which protected his bedroom door. 'Sorry you found me unready,' he said; 'I got in late from the club somehow, but they'll bring us up some dinner presently. Looking at that thing, eh?' he asked, as he saw Mark's eye rest on a small high-heeled satin slipper in a glass case which stood on a bracket near him. 'That was Kitty Bessborough's once—you remember Kitty Bessborough, of course? She gave it to me just before she went out on that American tour, and got killed in some big railway smash somewhere, poor little woman! I'll tell you some day how she came to make me a present of it. Here's Binney with the soup now.'

Mrs. Binney sent up a perfect dinner, at which her husband assisted in a swallow-tailed coat and white tie, a concession he would not have made for every lodger, and Caffyn played the host to perfection, though with every course he asked himself inwardly, 'Shall I open fire on him yet?' and still he delayed.

At last he judged that his time had come; Binney had brought up coffee and left them alone. 'You sit down there and make yourself at home,' said Caffyn genially, thrusting Mark down into a big saddle-bag arm-chair ('where I can see your confounded face,' he added inwardly). 'Try one of these cigars—they're not bad; and now we can talk comfortably. I tell you what I want to talk about,' he said presently, and a queer smile flitted across his face; 'I want to talk about that book of yours. Oh, I know you want to fight shy of it, but I don't care. It isn't often I have a celebrated author to dine with me, and if you didn't wish to hear it talked about you shouldn't have written it, you know. I want you to tell me a few facts I can retail to people on the best authority, don't you know; so you must just make up your mind to conquer that modesty of yours for once, old fellow, and gratify my impertinent curiosity.'

Mark was feeling so much at ease with himself and Caffyn that even this proposition was not very terrible to him just then. 'All right,' he said lazily; 'what do you want to know first?'

'That's right. Well, first, I must tell you I've read the book. I'd like to say how much I was struck by it if I might.'

'I'm very glad you liked it,' said Mark.

'Like it?' echoed Caffyn; 'my dear fellow, I haven't been so moved by anything for years. The thought you've crammed into that book, the learning, the passion and feeling of the thing! I envy you for being able to feel you have produced it all.' ('That ought to fetch him,' he thought.)

'Oh, as for that,' said Mark with a shrug, and left his remark unfinished, but without, as the other noticed, betraying any particular discomposure.

'Do you remember, now,' pursued Caffyn, 'how the central idea first occurred to you?'

But here again he drew a blank, for Mark had long ago found it expedient to concoct a circumstantial account of how and when the central idea had first occurred to him.

'Well, I'll tell you,' he said. 'It shows how oddly these things are brought about. I was walking down Palace Gardens one afternoon....' and he told the history of the conception of 'Illusion' in his best manner, until Caffyn raged internally.

'You brazen humbug!' he thought; 'to sit there and tell that string of lies to me!' When it was finished he remarked, 'Well, that's very interesting; and I have your permission to tell that again, eh?'

'Certainly, my dear fellow,' said Mark, with a wave of his hand. His cigar was a really excellent one, and he thought he would try another presently.

('We must try him again,' thought Caffyn; 'he's deeper than I gave him credit for being.')

'I'll tell you an odd criticism I heard the other day. I was talking to little Mrs. Bismuth—you know Mrs. Bismuth by name? Some fellow has just taken the "Charivari" for her. Well, she goes in for letters a little as well as the drama, reads no end of light literature since she gave up tights for drawing-room comedy, and she would have it that she seemed to recognise two distinct styles in the book, as if two pens had been at work on it.'

('Now I may find out if that really was the case after all,' he was thinking.) 'I thought you'd be amused with that,' he added, after a pause. Mark really did seem amused; he laughed a little.

'Mrs. Bismuth is a charming actress,' he said, 'but she'd better read either a little more or a little less light literature before she goes in for tracing differences in style. You can tell her, with my compliments, that a good many pens were at work on it, but only one brain. Where is it your matches live?'

'I can't draw him,' thought Caffyn. 'What an actor the fellow is! And yet, if it was all aboveboard, he wouldn't have said that! and I've got Holroyd's handwriting, which is pretty strong evidence against him. But I want more, and I'll have it.'

He strolled up to the mantelpiece to light a cigarette, for which purpose he removed the shade from one of the candles, throwing a stronger light on his friend's face, and then, pausing with the cigarette still unlighted between his fingers, he asked suddenly: 'By the way, Fladgate said some other fellow wrote the book for you the other day!' That shot at least told; every vestige of colour left Mark's face, he half rose from his chair, and then sat down again as he retorted sharply: 'Fladgate said that! What the devil are you talking about...? What fellow?'

'Why, you were there when he said it. Some amanuensis you gave the manuscript to.'

The colour came back in rather an increased quantity to Mark's cheeks. What a nervous fool he was! 'Oh, ah—that fellow!' he said; 'I remember now. Yes, I was absurdly anxious to remain unknown, you see, in those days, and—and I rather wanted to put something in the way of a poor fellow who got his living by copying manuscripts; and so, you see——'

'I see,' said Caffyn. 'What was his name?'

'His name?' repeated Mark, who had not expected this and had no name ready for such immediate use. 'Let me see; I almost forget. It began with a B I know; Brown—Brune—something like that—I really don't recollect just now. But the fact is,' he added with a desperate recourse to detail, 'the first time I saw the beggar he looked so hard up, dressed in——' ('Buckram!' thought Caffyn, but he said nothing)—'in rags, you know, that I felt it would be quite a charity to employ him.'

'So it is,' agreed Caffyn. 'Did he write a good hand? I might be able to give him some work myself in copying out parts.'

'Oh, he'd be useless for that!' put in Mark with some alarm; 'he wrote a wretched hand.'

'Well, but in the cause of charity, you know,' rejoined Caffyn, with inward delight. 'Hang it, Ashburn, why shouldn't I do an unselfish thing as well as you? What's the fellow's address?'

'He—he's emigrated,' said Mark; 'you'd find it rather difficult to come across him now.'

'Should I?' Caffyn returned; 'well, I daresay I should.'

And Mark rose and went to one of the windows for some air. He remained there for a short time looking idly down the darkening street. A chapel opposite was just discharging its congregation, and he found entertainment in watching the long lighted ground-glass windows, as a string of grotesque silhouettes filed slowly across them, like a shadow pantomime turned serious.

When he was tired of that and turned away from the blue-grey dusk, the luxurious comfort of the room struck him afresh. 'You've made yourself uncommonly comfortable here,' he said appreciatively, as he settled down again in his velvet-pile chair.

'Well, I flatter myself I've improved the look of the place since you saw it last. Poor Holroyd, you see, never cared to go in for this kind of thing. Queer reserved fellow, wasn't he?'

'Very,' said Mark; and then, with the perverse impulse which drives us to test dangerous ice, he added: 'Didn't you say, though, the other evening that he had no secrets from you?' ('Trying to pump me, are you?' thought the other; 'but you don't!') 'Did I?' he answered, 'sometimes I fancy, now and then, that I knew less of him than I thought I did. For instance, he was very busy for a long time before he left England over something or other, but he never told me what it was. I used to catch him writing notes and making extracts and so on.... You were a great friend of his, Ashburn, weren't you? Do you happen to know whether he was engaged on some work which would account for that, now? Did he ever mention to you that he was writing a book, for instance?'

'Never,' said Mark; 'did he—did he hint that to you?'

'Never got a word out of him; but I daresay you, who knew him best, will laugh when I tell you this, I always had my suspicions that he was writing a novel.'

'A novel?' echoed Mark; 'Holroyd! Excuse me, my dear fellow, I really can't help laughing—it does seem such a comic idea.'

And he laughed boisterously, overcome by the humour of the notion, until Caffyn said: 'Well, I didn't know him as well as you did, I suppose, but I shouldn't have thought it was so devilish funny as all that!' For Caffyn was a little irritated that the other should believe him to be duped by all this, and that he could not venture as yet to undeceive him. It made him viciously inclined to jerk the string harder yet, and watch Mark's contortions.

'He wasn't that sort of man,' said Mark, when he had had his laugh out; 'poor dear old fellow, he'd have been as amused at the idea as I am.'

'But this success of yours would have pleased him, wouldn't it?' said Caffyn.

For a moment Mark was cut as deeply by this as the speaker intended; he could give no other answer than a sigh, which was perfectly genuine. Caffyn affected to take this as an expression of incredulity. 'Surely you don't doubt that!' he said; 'why, Holroyd would have been as glad as if he had written the book himself. If he could come back to us again, you would see that I am right. What a meeting it would be, if one could only bring it about!'

'It's no use talking like that,' said Mark rather sharply. 'Holroyd's dead, poor fellow, at the bottom of the Indian Ocean somewhere. We shall never meet again.'

'But,' said Caffyn, with his eyes greedily watching Mark's face, 'even these things happen sometimes; he may come back to congratulate you still.'

'How do you mean? He's drowned, I tell you ... the dead never come back!'

'The dead don't,' returned Caffyn significantly.

'Do you—you don't mean to tell me he's alive!'

'If I were to say yes?' said Caffyn, 'I wonder how you would take it.'

If he had any doubts still remaining, the manner in which Mark received these words removed them. He fell back in his seat with a gasp and turned a ghastly lead colour; then, with an evident effort, he leaned forward again, clutching the arms of the chair, and his voice was hoarse and choked when he was able to make use of it. 'You have heard something,' he said. 'What is it? Why can't you tell it? Out with it, man! For God's sake, don't—don't play with me like this!'

Caffyn felt a wild exultation he had the greatest difficulty in repressing. He could not resist enjoying Mark's evident agony a little longer. 'Don't excite yourself, my dear fellow,' he said calmly. 'I oughtn't to have said anything about it.'

'I'm not excited,' said Mark; 'see—I'm quite cool ... tell me—all you know. He—he's alive then ... you have heard from him? I—I can bear it.'

'No, no,' said Caffyn; 'you're deceiving yourself. You mustn't let yourself hope, Ashburn. I have never heard from him from that day to this. You know yourself that he was not in any of the boats; there's no real chance of his having survived.'

For it was not his policy to alarm Mark too far, and least of all to show his hand so early. His experiment had been successful; he now knew all he wanted, and was satisfied with that. Mark's face relaxed into an expression of supreme relief; then it became suspicious again as he asked, almost in a whisper, 'I thought that—but then, why did you say all that about the dead—about coming back?'

'You mustn't be angry if I tell you. I didn't know you cared so much about him, or I wouldn't have done it. You know what some literary fellow—is it Tennyson?—says somewhere about our showing a precious cold shoulder to the dead if they were injudicious enough to turn up again; those aren't the exact words, but that's the idea. Well, I was thinking whether, if a fellow like poor Holroyd were to come back now, he'd find anyone to care a pin about him, and, as you were his closest friend, I thought I'd try how you took it. It was thoughtless, I know. I never dreamed it would affect you in this way; you're as white as chalk still—it's quite knocked you over. I'm really very sorry!'

'It was not a friendly thing to do,' said Mark, recovering himself. 'It was not kind, when one has known a man so long, and believed him dead, and then to be made to believe that he is still alive, it—it——. You can't wonder if I look rather shaken.'

'I don't,' said Caffyn; 'I quite understand. He is not quite forgotten after all, then? He still has a faithful friend in you to remember him; and he's been dead six months? How many of us can hope for that? You must have been very fond of him.'

'Very,' said Mark, with a sad self-loathing as he spoke the lie. 'I shall never see anyone like him—never!'

('How well he does it, after all!' thought Caffyn. 'I shall have plenty of sport with him.') 'Would it give you any comfort to talk about him now and then,' he suggested, 'with one who knew him, too, though not as well perhaps as you did?'

'Thanks!' said Mark, 'I think it would some day, but not yet. I don't feel quite up to it at present.'

'Well,' said the other, with a wholly private grin, 'I won't distress you by talking of him till you introduce the subject; and you quite forgive me for saying what I did, don't you?'

'Quite,' said Mark. 'And now I think I'll say good-night!'

The horror of those few moments in which he had seen detection staring him in the face still clung to him as he walked back to his lodgings. He cursed his folly in ever having exposed himself to such tremendous risks, until he remembered that, after all, his situation remained the same. He had merely been frightened with false fire. If he had not been very sure that the dead would never rise to denounce him, he would not have done what he had done. How could Vincent Holroyd have escaped? Still, it was an ugly thought, and it followed him to his pillow that night and gave him fearful dreams. He was in a large gathering, and Mabel was there, too; he could see her at the other end of an immense hall, and through the crowd Holroyd was slowly, steadily making his way to her side, and Mark knew his object; it was to denounce him. If he could only reach him first, he felt that somehow he could prevent him from attaining his end, and he made frantic efforts to do so; but always the crowd hedged him in and blocked his way with a stupid impassibility, and he struggled madly, but all in vain. Holroyd drew nearer and nearer Mabel, with that stern set purpose in his face, while Mark himself was powerless to move or speak. And so the dream dragged itself on all through the night.

He had some thoughts, on waking, of setting his fears to rest for ever by making some further inquiries, but when he read once more the various accounts he had preserved of the shipwreck, he convinced himself willingly enough that nothing of the kind was necessary. He could dismiss the matter from his mind once for all, and by breakfast-time he was himself again.

Caffyn, now that his wildest hopes of revenge were realised, and he saw himself in a position to make terrible reprisals for the injury Mark Ashburn had done him, revelled in a delicious sense of power, the only drawback to his complete enjoyment of the situation being his uncertainty as to the precise way of turning his knowledge to the best account.

Should he turn upon Mark suddenly with the intimation that he had found him out, without mentioning as yet that Holroyd was in the land of the living? There would be exquisite pleasure in that, and what a field for the utmost ingenuity of malice in constant reminders of the hold he possessed, in veiled threats, and vague mocking promises of secrecy! Could any enemy desire a more poignant retribution? He longed to do all this, and no one could have done it better; but he was habitually inclined to mistrust his first impulses, and he feared lest his victim might grow weary of writhing; he might be driven to despair, to premature confession, flight—suicide, perhaps. He was just the man to die by his own hand and leave a letter cursing him as his torturer, to be read at the inquest and get into all the papers. No, he would not go too far; for the present he decided to leave Mark in happy ignorance of the ruin tottering above him. He would wait until he was even more prosperous, more celebrated, before taking any decisive steps. There was little fear that he would see his revenge some day, and meanwhile he must be content with such satisfaction as he could enjoy in secret.

'I must put up with the fellow a little longer,' he thought. 'We will go on mourning our dear lost friend together until I can arrange a meeting somehow. A telegram or letter to the Ceylon plantation will fetch him at any time, and I don't care about doing my charming Mabel such a good turn as bringing him back to her just yet. I wonder how my worthy plagiarist is feeling after last night. I think I will go round and have a look at him.'