COPYRIGHT.

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CHAPTER I.
MEREDITH COMES HOME.

       At Southampton he had bought an armful of reading matter — half a dozen daily papers and almost as many illustrated weeklies. For more than four years Jim Meredith had not seen an English paper that was not many weeks old, and the sight of one containing news as recent as yesterday's seemed, more than anything else, to bring it home to him that he had once again dropped back into the hum of civilisation.

       Yet beyond a glance across the headlines as he waited for change at the bookstall, his interest in the papers seemed to end with their purchase. He dropped them in a heap in a corner seat of the train that was to take him west; throughout the journey to Cardiff they lay by his side in the railway carriage unopened.

       The train started; Southampton was left behind; Meredith sat looking through the window with eager intentness. How good it was to see the green country stretching away before his eyes, rushing by — with now a glimpse of clear running water glittering in the sunlight, and now a cluster of red roofs peeping through trees, and some square old grey tower rising sentinel-like; to see the wide sweep of hill and valley over which the long shadows of drifting white clouds flitted — all these things that to this tall, bronzed man, come back this morning from the other side of the world, were inalienably home!

       "I'm glad I came home in May!" Meredith said suddenly aloud.

       There was a magic in the very word "May" for a man coming back from the contrasting glare and colour of the East — a word to set an exile dreaming of green opening buds and cool, misty mornings and dew glistening on violets in dim woodland places.

       Then, as the words escaped him, Meredith looked quickly across the carriage, remembering that he was not alone. The other occupant, an elderly man, who looked like a soldier, met the glance with a smile.

       "Been abroad long?" the older man asked.

       "Four years. I've been in India — helping to build a bridge or two over which a railroad track will run presently," Meredith said in his pleasant voice, softened by just the faintest touch of Celtic intonation. "Among the Himalayan foothills, a hundred miles from anywhere — goodness knows what the Government wants a railway there for!" he added with a laugh.

       There was an almost boyish exhilaration in his laugh. How good it was to be back! There had been a thrill for Jim Meredith beyond power of telling when the P. and O. touched Southampton that morning. To see an English landscape again after four years, with its miracle of delicate green and grey tones — to know that he had done with India for good!

       A tall, well-built man of eight and twenty; the pleasant face, clean-shaved, and tanned by the Indian sum to within an inch or two of the crisp, close-cropped hair, was infinitely good-humoured; the steady, grey eyes, well-set under level brows, invited liking and confidence; there was an air of breeding and character in every line of the face that made mere good looks superfluous.

       There's an old dilapidated bungalow perched on a hill side, went on Meredith, reminiscently, as the two men fell talking, "with a great mountain facing it across the ravine, always white above the snow-line — the only moderately cool thing in a climate where even one's whisky and soda is lukewarm! — where some pals of mine are thinking enviously of me now, I know; poor beggars, doomed to stay out there with years of work ahead of 'em on that railway that is to run from desolation-point to desolation-point! Just, as I thought I was myself, until six months ago," he added.

       Reserve may be a characteristic of the Briton behind his own Dover Cliffs, but not of the Briton who has lived long in places where the sight of a strange white face is an event.

       "Then you're not just home on leave? You are not going back?"

       Meredith laughed. He made a little straightening movement of his shoulders, as though throwing off a burden — the gesture was quite unconscious.

       "No, the last bridge is built out there that I shall have a hand in," he said. "I'm emancipated — back for good. A bit of tremendous luck tumbled into my lap, clean from the clouds, six months ago. I'd never expected it, and at first I thought the cable from home telling me of it must be a hoax, until I reflected I had no friend rich enough to indulge in an elaborate joke on me at goodness knows how much per word! It seemed almost beyond belief to know that my prospects no longer depended on the pleasure of a firm of contractors to the Indian Government — that I could snap my fingers in their faces! Jove, the six months that followed were the longest I've lived through!"

       "So you didn't come home at once?"

       "No — you see, there was the bridge to finish. I don't mean, of course, that I was indispensable; only — well, it wouldn't have been playing the game. I stayed, of course, till the bridge was finished."

       But the drudgery was over now; that and the loneliness of exile, dogged by the always imminent menace of ophthalmia and sunstroke, that had made the work drudgery — a handful of white men in charge of hundreds of brown coolies swarming like a colony of ants over the great iron caissons. Over and done with; he was his own master. And now he was on his way home.

       Meredith was conscious of a growing, consuming impatience as Bristol was left behind and the train in-sh-ed through the Severn Tunnel towards the borderland of his own country. Not till Newport was passed, and the train was racing down to Cardiff, where away to the North and the West rose the dim distant line of hills, did it seem quite like home.

       And then the end of his journey . . . the train slowing up by a busy platform. Cardiff.

       Cardiff, to which he was returning a rich man — wealthy even for this big money-making city, as six months ago, when his profession of engineer was all he had to depend on, he had never dreamed of being. Somehow, as Meredith ran through the familiar scenes and landmarks into bustle of the station, even yet it was hard to realise the tremendous change that had come into his life since his last sight of his native place four years ago.

       If only his mother had been alive to welcome him back — the sweet-voiced, gentle mother he had loved, who had died within a year of his going out to India; for an instant the call of Memory brought a sudden dimness to his eyes and now Jim Meredith was out on the platform, shaking hands energetically with two old friends whom he had caught sight of, waiting expectantly, before the train stopped.

       "Its jolly good of you to come to meet me; I hardly expected to see you at any rate, doctor, such a busy man as you are!" cried Meredith, shaking hands first with the doctor's wife, an elderly lady with a sweet, motherly face, and then with chubby, not to say cherubic, Dr. Morgan Powell — friends of his boyhood, whose guest for the present he was going to be. "Jove, I've been looking forward to this moment ever since I left Bombay."

       "Oh, I left my partner grumbling at the extra amount of work I've thrown on his shoulders this afternoon," cried the little doctor with his pleasant laugh, that was said to do as much towards helping his patients to recover as his professional skill. "Glad to see you back, boy, and to find you looking so fit, as though India agreed with you."

       "It's the leaving of it that agrees with me!" returned Meredith gaily, as he turned to give a porter instructions about his luggage.

       The Powells were his oldest friends in Cardiff, friends of his people before him. They walked to the station entrance, where the doctor's motor-car was waiting.

       It was about five o'clock. St. Mary-street, as the car turned into it from the Great Western Approach, leaped up before Meredith's eyes a. picture of movement and animation and colour. The pavements and the arcades were full of stir and life. Newsboys were rushing past with the evening papers; there were the recurring sounds of the electric bells of trams running in every direction; the rear and babel of Cardiff rose throbbing about him like the lilt of a familiar song.

       How good it was to be home! There was a queer lump in Meredith's throat, and a little catch in his laugh, as he leaned forward with a boyish eagerness, his eyes alert and intent. Once, as the car had to slow up by the pavement, he caught sight of an old club acquaintance, whom he had never known particularly well, or even particularly liked. Meredith bent forward to greet him with a warmth that surprised the other man.

       It was the things of home clutching at him with that thrill that only a wanderer knows.

       The doctor, who was driving, was gossiping away; Meredith, watching the busy familiar scene, hardly heard what his host was saying, though he answered almost mechanically.

       "Well. you see, Jim, Cardiff hasn't stood still while you've been away; we're still expanding, up to the elbows making money — at least, some of us are. You will be, now you've come home a partner in 'Meredith, Muir, and Son," colliery and shipowners! Pretty surprised, weren't you, to drop into all your uncle's fortune? — and be one of the warmest men in Cardiff!"

       "Surprised? It took my breath away. Of course, he was only my father's half-brother, and, as you know, there was a coolness ever since I can remember — dad was too much of a dreamer to hit it off with a man like old Evan Meredith"; he spoke with a little rush of tender feeling at the thought of his father, the lovable, hopelessly impracticable man who had never succeeded at anything — "and, of course, there were other things. That the chap should have left me some small legacy wouldn't have surprised me, even though through his estrangement with my father I'd hardly spoken a dozen words to him within as many years, for blood's thicker than water; but to leave me practically everything — I haven't got used to it even yet!"

       "Well, that won't be difficult. Men reconcile themselves considerably sooner to good fortune than to bad — at least, that's my experience," responded the doctor. "I believe, by the way, that it was a near thing you did get such a big slice. The will in your favour was only made shortly before Evan Meredith's death. And that poor girl, who —– But the solicitors will tell you all about that to-morrow."

       The car had turned into Cathays Park; the bend of the road had brought into sight the outlines of the new Municipal Hall and the Law Courts, rising before them in white stately beauty, like an exquisite silver-point drawing etched on the pearl grey of the sky.

       "Look, Jim, aren't you proud of your native city?" cried Dr. Powell, pointing to the finely grouped buildings that had risen to completion during Meredith's absence. "And when we get the University College there. Hullo, did you see who that was?" he broke off suddenly.

       Swiftly passing on the other side of the wide road was an open carriage; a woman in widow's half-mourning lay back against the cushions, a handsome woman little more than three or four and twenty, whose beauty would have been more attractive had the unsmiling face been less proud and hard.

       There was an unusual stream of traffic between them; the woman had not happened to glance in their direction. But it had not needed his companion's words to draw Meredith's eyes to her. As his gaze fell upon her, for a moment the light had suddenly gone out of his face, leaving an odd, changed expression there.

       "Mrs. Restarrick, do you know, Jim, my wife and I used to think there was something between you and her in the days when she was 'the beautiful Miss Lloyd'?" went on the doctor. He was too busy steering through the traffic to notice Meredith's face.

       "Oh, you thought that?" said the younger man in a non-committal way.

       "Yes, and a good many others thought it too, I can tell you!" chuckled Dr. Powell. "Only you went off to India, and she married Restarrick, to be left a widow within a couple of years, and the romance we old fogies had planned was nipped in the bud."

       Meredith did not answer. During the rest of the drive to the doctor's residence in Roath Park he was curiously silent and abstracted; his exhilaration seemed to have received a sudden check.

       Perhaps, he was thinking of the woman of whom he had caught that passing glimpse, and thinking, too, of the last time he had seen her, on the night before he left England four years ago . . . . a soft night of late spring, in the old garden that might have been planned for lovers' meetings, where he had parted from her, with her promise singing in his heart, and her tears wet on his face as their lips had met. To-day's glimpse of Ethel Restarrick had touched to life more memories than Dr. Powell, for all his bantering words, had dreamed of. It was across the grave of an old broken dream that Meredith had seen again the woman who so soon after that parting had jilted him to marry a rich man.

       "Well, I suppose you've already made heaps of plans, Jim?" Mrs. Powell said presently, in the spacious, comfortable house by the Park.

       "No," he smiled back, "except that after dinner to-night I want to walk through Cardiff to see the faces, hear life surging about me, feel myself once again in the whirl of things, after having been out of it all for four years! And there are places one wants to talk to, as well as people, you know, after a long absence."

       "Yes, I understand," she said, with a sympathetic understanding that had been one of the qualities he had loved in her as a boy.

       Meredith went up to his room to dress for dinner. By his own request he had been given the same queer old bedroom at the top of the house that had been tacitly considered his from his boyhood; there were still in one corner a bundle of fishing-rods and a cricket bat that had belonged to him. Often, after the home at Llandaff where he had been born had been broken up, he had stayed with the Powells.

       On his father's death, his mother had returned to Wales, to Cardiff, where she had died. The same mail that brought him the letter from Ethel Lloyd, breaking off their engagement, which had always been secret, had brought him the news of his mother's death.

       He looked out from the dormer window, jutting out beneath a gable, across the great park, where children were playing and feeding the swans on the lake, and where lovers would be walking, as he and she — the memory came suddenly back to him — had once walked under the trees there by the rustic bridge over the brook. His eyes roved away towards the north-west, to the region of hills and wild mountain country, and the long valleys winding deep into its heart, bringing the waters of its rivers through Glamorgan too the Bristol Channel.

       Faint distant glimpses of far-falling hills, whose summits were merged mysteriously in the white clouds and the grey smoke of furnace fires: what his eye could not see, his imagination could picture — wild hills, rugged and impressive, the thought of which spoke to his heart with the old thrill, rolling away, one behind the other, and deep down beneath in the black heart of them the countless activities of industry going on ceaselessly . . . he stood staring out at the distant, broken, purpling line.

       "Home," he whispered, "I've come home!"

       Back to his own place and his own people!

       For an instant, as Meredith stood there, the face of the woman he had seen for a moment that afternoon in the street flashed back on him. It seemed subtly changed from that of the girl of four years ago: its beauty then had not known that hard look — that look that seemed to hint that, after all, in her marriage, that had been not for love but for money, the woman had missed something.

       He was glad he had seen her to-day. Bitter as his disappointment had been, he had fought it, down long ago, had long since told himself he was cured. Yet, perhaps, it had needed this sight of her to make Jim Meredith quite sure that he was not deceiving himself. That first glimpse had told him. No spark or the old passion for this woman who had thrown away his love for ambition was left among the dead embers. He was cured!

       When he was last in Cardiff all his thoughts of the future had centred inseparably about her; now he was back, and across the horizon of his mind were crowding new plans and dreams. Only in these plans this woman, the mere touch of whose hand had once had a magic to thrill his pulses, had no place.
 

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CHAPTER II.
THE NAME OF OLIVE LINDSAY.

       "Only what induced my uncle to leave me all these immerse interests of his? That's what puzzles me," said Jim Meredith, sitting in the big red leather chair in Mr. David Owen's private room.

       Mr. Owen was an elderly man, with a fringe of white whisker round his face, the senior partner of Messrs. Owen and Drury, solicitors to the estate of the late Evan Meredith.

       A copy of his uncle's will had been sent out to Meredith in India. With the exception of some minor legacies, and one of a thousand pounds to a Miss Olive Lindsay, he had inherited everything that old Evan Meredith had to leave.

       This morning the solicitor had been going into figures for his benefit; and those figures had taken Meredith's breath away. Even he had scarcely been prepared for the magnitude of his uncle's great colliery and shipping interests.

       "A pity you could not see your way to come home at once on receipt of our cable, Mr. Meredith. But I think you will find your interests in 'Meredith, Muir, and Son' have been carefully watched during your absence, Mr. Owen had said, in the course of going into those absorbing figures.

       Meredith had only the slightest acquaintance with Mr. Stephen Muir or his son, partners in the firm in which his late uncle had held the predominating interest, and now his partners. This morning, before keeping his appointment at the solicitors, he had gone down Bute-road to the offices of the firm, with its brass plate "Meredith, Muir, and Son" — a plate that had a sudden interest and significance for him. The "Meredith" inscribed thereon was now himself!

       He had given a hasty look into the handsome block of offices, not far from the dock gates, where the usual picturesque medley of mixed humanity, deck hands, stokers, men of all nationalities and colours, wanting a ship, hung about on the chance of being taken on, to see Stephen Muir.

       Muir had not yet come, but the "Son" of the trinity of partners was in his private room — a dry, precise, old young man, who suggested an automaton with freckles and sandy hair rather than a man. Meredith could have wished that Muir junior did not chill him so much. But all exceedingly capable business man, and one in whom, as he knew, Evan Meredith, who was a judge of men, had placed a great deal of confidence — which, after all, was the most important thing.

       What he briefly remembered about old Stephen Muir, the self-made man, was his rather massively pompous manner and the somewhat portly presence that always seemed to need an atmosphere of the highly polished mahogany and leather of his office.

       "You were in my uncle's confidence, and I'm rather interested to know why he suddenly remembered the fact of our relationship," went on Jim Meredith. "Dr. Powell said that it was quite an eleventh hour determination."

       Exactly, an eleventh hour determination, as you say — to be precise, three months before his death. Our late client tore up his previous will in this very room — the will that had made over the bulk of his fortune to Miss Olive Lindsay."

       "And why did he do that?" inquired Meredith with interest.

       The solicitor shrugged his shoulders.

       "Was it not natural under the circumstances?" he asked. "Mr. Meredith was disappointed, bitterly disappointed, cut to the heart. You see, it was a terrible blow —–"

       "Yes, but what circumstances do you refer to?" interrupted Meredith. "You forget that I only reached Cardiff last night, after having been away for some years. I suppose everyone assumes that I know everything, and, consequently, no one has told me anything. I'm quite in the dark. I do remember Dr. Powell used the words 'that poor girl'; no doubt referring to Miss Lindsay. But he said no more at the time, and I forgot to ask him later. I've heard nothing, Mr. Owen, because I suppose it is old stale news to everyone but myself, just come from a remote corner of the world, where newspapers come one's way at distant intervals, and my correspondents have been slack. Consider that I've heard nothing."

       The solicitor cleared his throat.

       "Miss Olive Lindsay was a young lady whom your uncle virtually adopted about two years ago. She was about 21 then —–"

       "Yes, I heard something about that," said Meredith reflectively. "It would be about the time he went to live in Surrey and gave up his house in Cardiff?"

       Meredith had never corresponded with the crotchety old man, whose final eccentricity had been to leave the bulk of his fortune to a nephew whom he had ignored in life; but he had heard from his friends the Powells at the time that Evan Meredith had suddenly in a fit of spleen given up his big house in Cardiff — for a reason eminently characteristic of him.

       The shipowner had been a candidate at the municipal elections for one of the city wards, and had been defeated. "Defeated by a secret conspiracy at work against me!" he had said, and doubtless believed it.

       In his pique he had taken a house in Surrey, this man who quarrelled with everybody, who had quarrelled with his half brother years ago on grounds as trifling, and had never made the quarrel up. He had merely retained a couple of rooms in one of the chief hotels in Cardiff for his use when he came up, as he did frequently, in connection with his business interests in the city. But he was getting an old man, and for the last year or so had been content to leave the details of the business more and more to his partners.

       "Yes, it was when your uncle went to live in Surrey that Miss Lindsay took a place in his house, virtually that of an adopted daughter," said the solicitor. "I have heard him described as a crusty old bachelor, but there must have been an unexpected vein of sentiment in him somewhere. As a younger man he had been engaged to be married, as doubtless you know; for some reason the marriage was broken off; subsequently the lady in question married someone else."

       "And Olive Lindsay was the daughter of his old sweetheart?" asked Meredith.

       "Yes. Our late client heard of her when she was dying, and went to see her. It had not been a happy marriage; the husband turned out a 'wrong 'un', in the slang phrase — very much a wrong 'un. The upshot was that Mr. Meredith asked the daughter of his old — ah — sweetheart" — Mr. Owen seemed to hesitate a little at the word. as though he felt in some way that it was incongruous with the traditions of a lawyer's office — "to live with him in his house in Surrey. I have never seen her; she never came to Cardiff, but I understand she was very like what her mother had been, and very charming; a beautiful girl. Our deceased client made his will, leaving her the bulk of his property; but in that will he left you the not inconsiderable sum of ten thousand pounds."

       Meredith stared at him in surprise.

       "He left me £10,000 in a former will," he cried.

       "Yes; without you knowing it, your uncle took a good deal of interest in your career: he used to say that you had grit and would get on, and, in spite of his — ah — differences with your side of the family, it pleased him."

       "But why on earth did he cancel that will and make this, in which he only leaves this girl Olive Lindsay £1,000?" cried Meredith.

       "I am surprised you should not know," began the solicitor.

       Meredith was beginning to be exasperated. Why was the man so long in coming to the point?

       "I repeat, I've just come back from India," he said impatiently, "and since my mother died I've not had many letters. It's my experience that friends, who will drop you an occasional line if you're no further off, say, than America, for some mysterious reason find it too great an effort to correspond with a person who won't get a letter for six weeks! And last night the Powells didn't refer to Misa Lindsay; we had so much else to talk about, you know. And I expect that, like you, they supposed I knew all about it."

       "But you saw the English papers sometimes?"

       "Sometimes — with big breaks between. But what should there be in the papers about it? Miss Lindsay isn't dead, I suppose? — since her name occurs in the will."

       "No, she is not dead; at least, I have no reason for supposing so, though we have advertised for her repeatedly — with no results," said the solicitor. "In the newspapers you saw, did you come across anything of the case referred to as the 'Black Pearl Affair'?"

       "Let me think — oh, yes, I saw something of that surely. A young girl who was accused of stealing some valuable black pearls and — by Jove, I remember; the name of the accused was Lindsay!" he cried startled. "Why, surely you don't mean —–"

       "Olive Lindsay. A very painful case indeed. And it was because of that case that your uncle tore up the will in this office. The girl he had adopted went to prison for six months for theft. I believe this revelation of her deceit cut him to the heart; he had learnt to love her. He tore up the will. 'I've got to leave my money to someone or something,' he said to me — 'and after all, my nephew's a Meredith; and he's got grit and energy, and he'll carry on the name in the big business I've built up. He shall be my heir.'"

       Meredith was hardly listening now. He remembered the case quite plainly — a young girl accused of deliberate theft in the house of an acquaintance. She had pleaded not guilty.

       So, but for this sin of hers, she and not he would have been the new "Meredith" of the firm, owner of this great fortune. He would have had ten thousand pounds, it was true, but not these vast colliery and shipping interests, compared with which that sum was a mere flea-bite.

       What a tragedy the thing was! He felt a sudden strange pity for this girl, who by one mad act had thrown away a fortune. Why had she done this incredible thing?

       The thought of this girl he had never seen ran through his mind throughout the rest of the interview that morning at the solicitors. . . . . a young beautiful girl of gentle breeding, standing in the dock, a tragic figure to be pitied, surely, as well as blamed. . . .

*       *       *       *       *      *

       "Yes, it's as well you instructed us not to forward any letters sent to you, care of us," Mr. Owen was saying. "The penalty of being heir to a rich man, you see, Mr. Meredith! The day after the "Evening Express" published particulars of the will the letters began to come in, 'not in single spies, but in battalions.'"

       Meredith looked at the waste paper basket full of letters, and hastened to disclaim any immediate desire to see the rest; the solicitor had informed him that there was another basketful or so in the clerk's office.

       "It strikes me there was a grim fitness about putting them in a waste paper basket!" he murmured, after opening three or four at random. A locust-cloud of begging letters: every person in the kingdom with a wild-cat scheme, needy men with patents of "the most wonderful invention of the age," the secretary of this or that charity — the writer of every letter seemed anxious to show Meredith how to dispose of his newly-acquired fortune.

       Meredith pushed the letters away. He crossed over to the window, and stood looking down into the street thoughtfully.

       "You say she has disappeared, that you can't hear anything of her — this Miss Lindsay?" he said suddenly.

       "No, not a word. She was released several months ago. Before the time of her release we sent a letter to the, prison authorities, to be handed to her before she left the prison, asking her to communicate with us, informing her that the late Mr. Meredith had left her a thousand pounds," said Mr. Owen. "We know, of course, the letter was given to her. But from that day to this she never communicated with us, has not answered any of our advertisements. She has simply vanished."

       "Has she any means?"

       "No means at all, so far as I know. It was because of that fact that our late client left this legacy to enable her to make a new start."

       "Why on earth did she do it at all?" broke out Meredith suddenly, turning to the solicitor.

       There was a little frown in his face. He could not get that tragic girlish figure out of his thoughts.

       "Well, you see, she had a dissolute father. Your uncle refused to let her have money to help him when he found that the man was always secretly applying to her, sponging on her. There is little doubt her father worked upon her feelings, and that she did this in a mad moment for him."

       "I suppose there was no doubt of her guilt?" said Meredith.

       "She was found guilty on the clearest evidence."

       "And yet one would think if she had been guilty she would have communicated with you, not ignored your letter, when a thousand pounds was only waiting to be claimed," said Meredith, thoughtfully. "It looks as though she were deliberately refusing to profit by my uncle's legacy. Poor girl!"

       She lingered in his thoughts hauntingly, the abject of an overwhelming pity, as he left the solicitor's office — a man made rich at this woman's expense, made rich because of her sin.

       "And why does she remain so persistently silent? With no means, and a thousand pounds to be had for the claiming? What does her inexplicable silence mean?"
 

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CHAPTER III.
THE GIRL IN THE ROAD.

       Jim Meredith breathed a sigh of relief when he had said good-night to his hostess and his motor-car turned out of the carriage sweep of Stephen Muir's big, pretentious house at Penarth.

       No, he did not care for the Muirs, except in homœopathic doses — and he had had more than a homœopathic dose of them to-day. All day long at the offices in Bute-road they had been going into the details and audit of the firm, Meredith's initiation into the business of which he was now a partner; and afterwards he had motored over to dine with them.

       Stephen Muir was a type of the self-made Scotsman, who, with increasing prosperity, had put on a rather hectoring, pompous manner; his wife was a colourless woman of rather an acid tongue; the son Alfred was an excellent man of business, but so dry and bloodless as scarcely to be human.

       The daughter of the house, Elsie, was the only one of the family he liked. She was bright, very pretty, quite charming — and how she came to be the daughter of Stephen Muir was one of the eternal mysteries with which Nature occasionally likes to perplex us.

       There was another son, younger than Alfred; he was not in the business. Philip Muir had held a small post in the firm some years ago, until Evan Meredith had risen in his wrath and kicked him out. An idle waster, the exact antithesis of Alfred, who had since been a rolling stone, causing his father a good deal of anxiety. He was at home now with his parents, but he had not turned up at dinner that night.

       It was a fine, starlight night; the moon had not risen; there was the faintest suggestion of low-lying mist in the hedgerows, but it was clear overhead, as Meredith's car passed through one of the leafy lanes, green always even in winter, that lie within sound of the sea behind Penarth Headland. Before him, as the car carried him swiftly forward to Cardiff, from the East Moors rose the glare of the Dowlais blast furnaces, contrasts of flame and shadow tinting the sky.

       No, he did not care for the Muirs. It was a pity, as he would of necessity have to see much of them, and, no doubt, they were excellent people, but — there was a "but"! Somehow it had struck him to-day that there had been a faint undertone of resentment on their part, implied rather than expressed, as though they felt he was an interloper — or, perhaps, that was his fancy.

       "Have you made any plans yet where you will settle, Mr. Meredith?" Mrs. Muir had asked at dinner.

       "Well, I've set my heart on taking a certain house at Llandaff that has been dreaming away in its sleepy old garden for over a hundred years, if I can get it," he had said, covering with a lightness of manner a depth of very real feeling — "which I'm afraid I shan't be able to do, worse luck!"

       "Oh, these old places — picturesque no doubt, but I am always suspicious of the drains," Mrs. Muir had responded, who might always be safely trusted to put a heavy foot on a bit of sentiment. "No, a modern well-built house —–"

       "You mean the house where you used to live, Mr. Meredith?" Elsie Muir had broken in, with a quick intuitive sympathy which had pleased him.

       "Yes."

       It was occupied now, that old house in the wide village-like street, grass-bordered, of the tiny ecclesiastical city by the Taff, that still preserves its air of aloofness, although it is virtually become a suburb of Cardiff. The house where he was born, in the wide panelled hall of which as a boy he had often sat curled up in a corner of the wide oak settle by the fire, whilst his mother told him the old stories of giants and hobgoblins, her voice mingling with the bluster of the wind in the great chimney — it had always been his ambition to buy that house. Perhaps now that he was a rich man that old ambition could be realised.

       "Your uncle made a great mistake in giving up his house here; I warned him he would repent, and repent I believe he did," Stephen Muir had said heavily, apropos of nothing in particular. "He spent the last few months of his life in Cardiff, with the servants eating their heads off in his house in Surrey, in his hotel. No solid comfort like home in hotels; don't tell me," he added, looking round the room with its aggressively new, highly-polished furniture, with an air of complacent satisfaction.

       "Well, I shan't forsake Cardiff — even if they won't make me a councillor!" Meredith had retorted lightly.

       Rather a dull evening. It was much better to be out in the soft May night — no moon, and a dim purple sky of stars, and a faint breeze whispering in the tree-tops — gliding along in the car towards Cardiff! Through Cardiff, and away towards Llandaff, tempted by the soft beauty of the night, and by the thoughts that those words at dinner had provoked: his old ambition to buy that house he had been born in — perhaps now it might be possible, now that he was become a rich man, because of a girl's guilt. . . .

       Since he had heard that story in the solicitor's office, two days ago, he had obtained a file of papers and read up the case. The evidence had been clear and damning. He could picture the accused, a slim, girlish figure, poignantly tragic, standing in the dock as she pleaded not guilty. Could it be that the plea had been true? Only the evidence had seemed conclusive.

       The thought haunted Jim Meredith, filled him with, an intense pity. He wondered what Olive Lindsay was like; beautiful, the lawyer had said. And how she must hate him — irrationally, no doubt — feeling that he had supplanted her.

       But the legacy of a thousand pounds — she had not come forward to claim that. She had disappeared into the dark, had vanished utterly. Somehow that was not like the act of a guilty woman.

       Through Llandaff, past the ancient cross, and the beautiful cathedral with its moving traditions of stormy, troubled past days: and then the home of those boyish memories.

       Now the houses became fewer along the country road, dotted at increasing intervals. The road was wonderfully still and deserted — a contrast from the busy streets of Cardiff through which he had passed.

       "What was that?"

       The exclamation broke sharply from Meredith. A sudden sound had cut through the silence of the sleeping country. The sound of a shot, faint, and far away, that startled him for an instant, so complete had been the stillness.

       And then another exclamation broke from him, one of disgust this time. Something had gone wrong with the car. It stopped dead on its own responsibility, and it took Meredith several minutes' hot and exasperated labour in locating the cause and setting it right.

       At last the car was induced to move again. It raced forward, gathering speed, as if ashamed of its temporary bit of sulks.

       It was some two hundred yards further down the road, where the highway curved that Jim Meredith came upon the night's adventure.

       He became suddenly aware of a woman's figure, rushing across into the roadway, as though she had forced her way in desperate haste through a gap in the hedge, into the raking glare of the acetylene head-light. For a moment Meredith thought the car was on her, so sudden and unexpected had been the apparition. He swerved sharply, just in time as with a little startled cry the woman fell back. He jammed on the brakes, and jumped out and ran back to her, not sure in that first moment whether the car had touched her or not.

       She was standing there by the side of the roadway, a slight figure swaying unsteadily, and almost swooning. He saw that in the indistinctness of the dusk; he could hear her breath coming in quick, short gasps, as though she had been running desperately before she made her way through the gap in the hedge.

       "I hope didn't hurt you," he began, and then he suddenly saw, as he came near enough to put out a hand to prevent her, as he thought, from falling, that she was little more than a girl — perhaps, 22 or 23 at most. Where had she sprung from?

       Her face was quite white; it was a face of unusual beauty, framed with hair of rich wonderful colouring; but it was not that that made Meredith look at her more intently. There was fear in it, overwhelming terror starting out of her eyes; and it was not merely the startled fear of one who had narrowly escaped an accident. For the girl looked round in the direction from which she had come with a hunted expression, and there was a note of haunting fear vibrant in the low, refined voice, as she cried pantingly, shrinking back from his out-stretched hand:

       "Let me go — please let me go! No, I'm not hurt; it — it startled me your coming upon me suddenly only that I —–"

       She broke off abruptly in the midst of the nervous, faltered sentences, looking back again over her shoulder in the direction from which she had come, still with that hunted look, thrown up plainly for his eyes in the light of the lamp.

       What was it she feared? What was it she was flying from?

(To be continued on MONDAY).

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something.

---

CHAPTER IV.
WHAT SHE FEARED.

       Jim Meredith looked hard at the girl's white, strained face. The strangeness of the whole situation puzzled him.

       What had brought that note of terror into her tones? In spite of her evident effort to grip her voice to control, the underlying fear in it was unmistakeable — the fear that was reflected in the dark eyes, as she swept a swift, hunted glance back over her shoulder, almost as though listening for something she dreaded to hear.

       He followed the direction of her eyes. Beyond the hedge, through a gap of which she had forced her way a moment ago, were fields; behind them wooded grounds, dim and shadowy in the starlight. And still further away through the trees Meredith saw a light, that seemed like an eye watching them through the dusk as they stood there: doubtless the light at the back of a distant house fronting another road, marked by the line of telegraph poles black against the sky, that ran at an angle to that they were in — two roads that met and merged into one a hundred yards ahead of them.

       "Something has frightened you — something or someone," Meredith said, as her broken, breathless words faltered into silence. "Can I help you?"

       Who could she be this girl — to be out alone on these lonely roads at this hour? A woman of his own class; the breeding in the low voice told him that; simply as she was dressed in the dark grey coat and skirt, even his inexperienced eye could see their perfect cut. She looked so helpless and frail; she was still trembling, her breath coming quick and fast. He could not leave her like this — alone with her fear, whatever it was.

       "No, it is nothing; please do not trouble about me," she said stubbornly. "I — I was startled; the shock of seeing the lights of your oar unnerved me. I shall be all right. Please go on."

       Her voice was insistent; once as she was speaking a little sob caught her breath, breaking the words.

       "I am sorry; I didn't see you in time to stop — you appeared so suddenly in the road," Meredith said. "May I drive you to your friends? It is the least I can do after startling you so. You are tired and unstrung, not fit to be left; and I don't like leaving you," he added bluntly.

       The girl shook her head.

       "Please — please!" she said, her voice curiously dull and weary.

       He could do nothing. He raised his cap and turned to walk back to his car. Why was she so stubborn? he asked himself impatiently. He felt half like lifting her in the car bodily and insisting upon driving her back to her friends. Her words had been an evasion; he was sure of that. For all her disclaimer she was frightened of something — had been frightened before he nearly ran her down, else why had she broken wildly through the hedge? That last narrow escape had only been the final thing to unnerve her. Should he go back to her, as he still felt half inclined to do, and insist as one would insist with a child that did not know what was best for it?

       As the half-formed impulse was in his mind, a little broken cry reached him; he turned quickly; and the girl flung out her hands with a gesture of abandonment pitiful to see.

       "Oh, I'm frightened! Don't leave me — I — let me avail myself of your kindness," she faltered her wide, dark eyes searching his face feverishly, as though even yet she was asking herself if she could trust him. "I — oh, I can't explain — you must ask me to explain nothing," she broke out wildly; "but you have been so kind, and I think I can trust your face; I think you mean it when you say you want to help me —–"

       "I only want to help you, and I shall ask you to tell me nothing, except what you choose, and how can I help you," Meredith said quietly. The appeal in her eyes and voice stirred every instinct of chivalry in him. She seemed like a helpless child caught in this strange, mysterious trouble she would not explain. "Beyond that I shall seek to know nothing. You may trust me."

       Something in the gentle, level voice seemed to give her confidence.

       "Thank you," she whispered.

       She made an uncertain, faltering movement towards the car; in the light of the car lamp he saw that the hem of her skirt was wet; patches of mist lay in the damp dewy fields she had crossed. As he put out a supporting hand to her arm, he felt that she was shivering.

       "Let me wrap you in this. After running as you were, it will be dangerous for you to sit unless you are better wrapped up. You might catch a chill."

       And Meredith picked up the big motor coat that he had not been wearing.

       "Come, slip your arms into this."

       Tacitly she allowed him to wrap her in it.

       "Listen!"

       The swift, frightened cry broke from her as she was mounting the step of the car; her hands went quickly to her heart. She turned a white, frightened face to him. In the distance could be heard the sound of a horse's galloping hoofs.

       "If I am seen here —–" Her voice broke abruptly. He saw that she was utterly unnerved. Why should she think that the nearing hoof-beats should have anything to do with her? But he humoured her, as one humours a child.

       "But you must not be seen! If you do what I say, no one will recognise you. I have a spare motor cap here — quick, on with it!"

       Her hands shook as she took off the hat she was wearing, leaving her hair for a moment uncovered, and in the faint, misty light of the rising moon Meredith saw its glorious colouring: it was neither red nor brown, but a mingling of both, that made him think of the changing leaf of forests in autumn. Quickly she put the cap on and the motoring glasses that he handed to her. And he laughed, to give her confidence.

       "Come, I defy anyone to recognise you in that cap and those goggles!" he cried. "No one shall recognise you, I promise."

       He jumped into the car. The hoof-beats were lender now, rapidly nearing them. Not in their road, but coming down the cross-road that met it not far ahead and merged with it was someone on horseback, riding fast, hidden as yet by the tail hedge; a few more moments would bring the horseman into sight.

       "You have nothing to fear," Meredith whispered to her again re-assuringly. In his own mind he felt sure that it was only because she was in the grip of a fear that made everything lose its focus that his companion associated this man on horseback whom he had not yet even seen with the fear that haunted her. He jerked the lever; the car moved forward. It was best to go forward; in any case, by the time he could have turned the car in the not too wide road, the man riding hard on the other side of the hedge would be in the road and would have seen them.

       It was almost as they reached the meeting of the two ways that the man on horseback came into sight.

       Meredith felt the girl's hand suddenly touch and tighten on his arm with an involuntary, spasmodic gesture; and a swift answering suspicion leapt into his mind. The man who had just ridden into view was a mounted constable. And that unanswered question that from the first had throbbed ceaselessly through the web of his thoughts took a new significance: "What was she flying from? What did she fear?"

       The mounted man hailed Meredith with a

       "I beg your pardon, sir, but —–"

       "Come, officer, you're not going to say we're exceeding the speed-limit?" Meredith cried, forcing a laugh. He felt very unlike laughing. Things had suddenly assumed a new, unlooked-for, ugly aspect. The car had not been going at high speed; he slowed down, but did not stop. The constable rode up to the side of the car.

       "Oh, no, sir." he said with a smile. "One moment; sorry to detain you."

       And Meredith brought the oar to a stand-still.

       "You haven't seen a young woman on the road, sir, you or your man? — a woman dressed in darkish clothes, grey I think," asked the constable.

       "Near Llandaff I passed two or three, I fancy, and more still in Cardiff," retorted Meredith lightly — "but I can't say I noticed particularly how they were dressed!" He wanted to gain time. He realised that he was brought face to face with a situation he had not bargained for when he made his offer of help to the girl. "What was she like? Anything particular about her?"

       "Unfortunately her face wasn't seen, sir; but she'd be in an excited state, running — she was seen making a dash through the copse across the fields yonder, heading for this road. Have you seen anyone running, sir? I may say, she's wanted on a pretty serious charge."

       Meredith did not look across at his companion, but he could feel that she was trembling violently. She was sitting on the further side from the constable, in the shadow; deliberately he leaped forward to screen her the more.

       The constable evidently suspected nothing, had referred to him as "your man." The big coat, the cap pulled low over her brow hiding the coils of hair, the motoring glasses: the disguise of her sex was complete. "Wanted on a pretty serious charge!"

       But he had promised to help her; even had he suddenly become convinced that she was some guilty creature flying from justice, he would have felt bound by his promise; and even if no promise had been given under the circumstances his chivalry would have prompted him to shield her. But without proof he would not believe anything evil of this woman, slender and frail and helpless, who had thrown herself upon his mercy — this girl, whose eyes so full of pain and fear, the low voice so full of tears, had made their appeal to his pity.

       The thoughts flashed through his mind in a moment. He said quietly:

       "Afraid I can't help you, sergeant. I'll ask my man."

       Meredith spoke some words in French to his companion, to prevent the officer addressing any question to the supposed chauffeur; the low, brief answer came back in the same language. Meredith turned to the constable again and shook his head decisively.

       "I think my man and I have had the road pretty well to ourselves for far enough; and after Cardiff's passed, the roads are so deserted hereabouts that I expect one or other of us would have noticed anything suspicious. Running, you say?"

       "Yes, bolting for dear life — so the man who saw her said. Probably she'd lie low in the hedge, hide till you'd passed; she'd hear you coming long before you could see her; she'd hide. Bolting from yonder house, she was — Elmgrove Cottage."

       And he pointed in the direction of the distant house, the light from which Meredith had seen across the dim fields through the trees.

       "But we shall have her yet," he went on; "it's only just happened; she can't have got far. The dead man's servant saw her bolting from the back of the house — hadn't the wits to try and stop her; he was almost off his head with terror at the shock. I happened to be almost just outside in the road speaking to the constable on his beat, as he rushed out screaming —–"

       "But — a dead man did you say, sergeant?"

       There was a sudden horror in Meredith's voice.

       "Yes, sir. Lying there shot through the heart: that's how we found him! Murder's the matter, and a woman's got more than a finger in it. Well, I must be going on. Sorry to have detained you, sir. Good-night."

       The man saluted; then tapping his tall black riding-boots with his whip he galloped off down the road in the direction from which they had come.

---

CHAPTER V.
THE WOMAN SPEAKS.

       Mechanically Meredith's hand went to the lever; the car sprang forward; the sound of the thudding hoofs grew fainter in the distance. Neither the man nor the woman in the car spoke.

       "Murder's the matter . . . . lying there shot through the heart . . . . a woman's got more than a finger in it . . . . a woman dressed in dark grey." The sentences seemed to hammer in his brain to the tune of the receding hoof-beats, till the sound died away over the of silence.

       Murder! He had never dreamed of anything like this. Even now it was hard to realise that it was the woman sitting there by his side — this slight, delicate girl with the appeal in her eyes and voice — of whom the mounted constable had spoken: difficult even remotely to associate her with the bare thought of that ugly thing. An insistent feeling of unreality held him. To-night he seemed to have wandered out from the beaten ways of ordinary life into a world where nothing was real.

       He sat, not glancing once at his companion, staring out before him, where the chequered shadows of the leaves in the trees, stirring in the soft wind, wove fantastic wavering mosaics on the roadway. He had heard the report of a shot some fifteen minutes ago, just before the temporary breakdown of the car, but he had thought little of it — he had forgotten it utterly when he first saw the girl in the roadway.

       He seemed to be waiting for her to speak; it could only have been a minute or two since the man had ridden away — the man only doing his duty to whom he (Meredith) had lied to put a barrier in the way of that duty — but to Meredith it seemed like an eternity of waiting. Then, though he was not looking at her, he became conscious that the girl was swaying forward unsteadily, with a sudden, deep, shivering breath. Swiftly he put one arm round her, afraid that she was fainting, that she might be thrown out of the car; he felt a loosened strand of soft hair brush his cheek.

       "Thank you; I — I am all right now."

       She was making a strong effort to steady herself; then with a little movement she drew herself from his arm.

       As he looked at her anxiously, he caught a momentary glimpse of the curve of her cheek against the dusk, a glimpse of the delicate, beautiful face, white in the faint light. She had taken off the glasses, and she pressed her hands over her eyes; then, with her face still covered and her head bent low, she sobbed as though her heart would break.

       Meredith set his teeth. He had never heard a woman weep like this; it touched his pity as no words could have done.

       He sat staring out before him, as the car raced on, waiting till her emotion should have spent itself, not speaking yet — what was there to say? In the fields at the side of the road the mists were rising; on the hedgerows filmy cobwebs glittering with dew; the shadows of the dark trees by the roadside; all passed like the shifting scenes of a dream. Everything seemed tinged with that invading sense of reality.

       Suddenly the girl raised her head, fighting with her emotion, fighting to steady her voice.

       "You have been very good to me," came the low, broken words.

       "That's all right," he muttered.

       "But I didn't do it. I was the woman they saw flying, of course, but — oh, you don't think that of me?" she cried. "Let me see your face. You don't think that of me?"

       Meredith did not speak. Words had become difficult; the environment of this queer adventure was suddenly that of tragedy. He had a sudden vision of a grim court, with the suspended Sword of Justice, and the judge in ermine and scarlet — all the pitiless machinery of the law . . . . and this girl, frail, helpless, standing in the dock. His teeth clenched suddenly.

       "Oh, you must believe me! Should I, could I have appealed to you, throw myself on your mercy if I'd been guilty of a thing like that?" she cried.

       It was no reason, or only a woman's reason, but to this girl it seemed a sufficient one.

       Meredith himself knew that it was no reason; knew that a cooler and, perhaps, wiser judgment would have refused to form an opinion on her word alone; yet he could not, would not, believe her guilty of that hideous thing that the mounted constable had put into words.

       Perhaps he was an impulsive fool — the thought was in his mind — but to him at least she was innocent; would remain innocent at least till he had proof that she was guilty. And for the part he had played, to-night he had no regret.

       "I don't judge you, I know nothing," he said. "Not your judge, only the man who wants to help you."

       "Oh, but you must believe me, you must!" she cried wildly, leaning forward and gripping his arm, her dark eyes searching his face. "When I accepted your help I didn't even know that anyone could think I had done it; it wasn't until that mounted constable spoke that I realised. . . . I fled because I was frightened at the horror of it, and I knew that I should be called on to explain why I was there: questions put to me that I dared not answer, and I turned and ran from that house too stupefied with horror, I think, even to cry out; all I cared about was to get away. . . . I had looked in at the open French window and seen him lying there dead in the glare of yellow lamp-light, the man I feared and hated — (and a sudden note of passion beat into the low, excited voice) — feared and hated. God knows for what good cause!"

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it.

---

CHAPTER V. (Continued).
THE WOMAN SPEAKS.

       Her voice faltered and broke; there was horror in the girl's face as though the picture of the thing she spoke of was before her eyes still; and for a moment, she put up her hands as if instinctively she would shut out that haunting memory.

       "All I thought of was to get away unseen," she went on, speaking rapidly, excitedly — not that I ever thought of anyone suspecting me of his death; I wasn't even in the house. As I turned and ran I heard through the open French window a sudden cry — a man's cry; someone had come into the room where the dead man lay with face upturned and smiling in the glare of the lamp-light, had seen what I saw. I could hear his footsteps as he rushed through the window into the garden, and at first I thought, of course, he was following me; but he did not; he ran, screaming, round to the front of the house, shouting out to the police. But he saw me — and I realise now how suspicious my presence there must have seemed. But the man was dead when I reached the house — dead when I peeped in through that window at the back. I swear it. Oh, you must believe that!"

       "Hush! You are only exciting yourself," Meredith said earnestly; there was deep pity in his face, a world of pitying sympathy in his voice. "You need not defend yourself to me. I believe you, I believe you implicitly."

       He knew nothing of her; until to-night when she had come across his life like a breath of storm he had never even known of her existence: there was no shred of proof to tell him that this woman was not lying. Once, four years ago, another woman — a woman in whose face, beautiful in its colder way as this girl's, candour and truth had seemed written in every line — had spoken words to him on whose sincerity he would have staked his life . . . . a troth given of a steadfast love that was never to falter or change — and the woman who had spoken them in that moon-lit garden had by her actions given the lie to them within a few short months. He had no proof that this woman was not tricking him too; and yet — and yet —–

       He was looking into the beautiful face, wistful and tremulous in that faint light of watching stars, touched with its passion and appeal . . . . and, despite past experience, again Jim Meredith felt he would stake all on a woman's truth — that of an unknown woman. Impulsively illogical, maybe,, yet he knew she was innocent. He asked no proof; he wanted none.

       "Thank you for that!" she cried; and her lips moved quiveringly, as with an impulsive movement she bent forward and touched his hand; and the action sent a sudden tingling thrill through him. "So many are readier to think the worse rather than the best of one. But for you I should not have escaped to-night — and the police might not have been so ready to believe me —–"

       "No; circumstances have made the innocent appear guilty before to-day, I'm afraid," he said.

       "Yes — yes," she cried, with a sudden catching of her breath, staring out before her with a strange look in the wide eyes, as though for a moment her thoughts were far away. "I feel I can't thank you — I can't find the words. And I thank you even more for believing in me, than for helping me to escape."

       "Oh, that's nonsense," he interrupted. "I wanted to help you, of course — I was glad to be able to help you; any man would have been."

       "Not every man, I think — and not every man would have been so ready to believe the best and not the worst . . . . yet, how could they think I did it?" she broke out with sudden vehemence — "I who never hurt anyone in my life!"

       "It was an impersonal woman, not you; just a woman they saw flying against whom the suspicion was levelled," he said, gently. "But that's over and done with. Thank God the man who caught a glimpse of you did not see your face. And now you are safe. No suspicion can fall on you. No one shall ever know from me that you were near that house to-night. We are safely out of the danger-zone; the police-search will be confined to a comparatively narrow radius which we're far beyond." He paused; then added quickly: "No one saw you going there?"

       She shook her head.

       "No, I think not; I am sure not. I slipped in at the gate when no one was about; I only went because —–" She checked herself abruptly. "I meant to see him for two minutes, and then go as secretly as I had come. I wore a thick veil —–"

       "But where is your veil?" he demanded sharply.

       Instinctively she put up her hand, with a sudden bewildered look.

       "You were not wearing it when I first saw you," he went on.

       It was not on the hat that she had taken off.

       "I must have lost it in my flight!" she cried in dismay.

       A little frowning look came into his face, but he did not speak; he did not wish to communicate his own anxiety to her. If her veil were found, might it not give a hint to the police — great issues have sprung before to-day from clues as slender — a hint that it was a woman of superior rank possibly to that they had imagined for whom they must search? For though he had a large masculine ignorance of such purely feminine matters, even trivial things like veils must differ in quality. He resolutely put the thought from him.

       I think you are safe now. I think you have nothing to worry over, nothing to fear any longer."

       She drew a deep, sobbing breath. She tried to speak and thank him again, but her voice failed her.

       "What we have to think of now is the immediate future," he went on. "I said I would ask no questions, and I'm not going to — except this: Where am I to take you? The sooner you are safe home with your friends now the better."

       "Yes — yes."

       She was silent a moment. Some distant church clock struck, filling in the pause. Nine o'clock. As the beat of the strokes came to him, Meredith could hardly believe that it was only nine, so much had been crowded into that last half hour.

       "Will you drive me to Radyr station, please — since I may trespass on your kindness a little further? Radyr station is so far from the — the place where the police are searching. I shall be quite safe, and there I could take a train home."

       She gave no hint where her home was, who her people were, and he had said he would ask no questions. For a moment he found himself wondering in which direction the train would take her. Back towards Llandaff and Cardiff, or in the other direction, further away? Meredith remembered that there were trains both to Cardiff and to Pontypridd from that station between nine and ten. They were not very far from Radyr station; four years' absence had not made him forget his bearings.

       A little distance from the gleaming lights of the station she slipped out of the motoring coat — such a slim, girlish figure for that great clumsy coat! As he took it from her, some of her own personality seemed subtly to linger about it — a suggestion of the faint, elusive perfume that clung about her. She put on her hat.

       "Don't come nearer to the station, please, lest —–" She did not finish the words.

       "You are to be trusted to take care of yourself now?" he said with a forced lightness.

       "Oh, I am quite myself now. I shall be all right."

       He had jumped out and took her hand to help her down. There was a moment's pause, as they stood facing each other. Then:

       "I shall never forget your kindness," she said in a low voice, holding oat her hand to him, "though I can't find the words to thank you for it as I would." She turned her face away abruptly: he saw the tremulous mouth, the eyes that had suddenly filled with unshed tears.

       And now she was gone, and he was alone with the curious sense of unreality again on him.

       Who was this woman with tie beautiful face and the terror-haunted eyes, who for a little while had flashed across his life, as it were, out of the dark and had passed into the dark again?

       During the last half-hour a strange sense of intimacy had grown up swiftly out of the circumstances that had brought them together — and not to know her name, doubtless not to see her again. He had been tempted to break his word, to put the question to her . . . . He watched her cross into the station entrance. Outside the station a porter was standing gossiping with someone. He saw the man touch his cap as the girl passed: evidently the porter knew her, could have answered that question for him. Only to put the question would be underhand, would be to break his word. She passed into the station, out of sight.

*       *       *       *       *      *

       The chapter was closed. Meredith set the car going again. Now that it was past and over the thing was more like a dream than a reality. But the memory of her face, of the low, liquid cadences of her voice lingered with him as he drove away: a dream that had suddenly become part of his life, a memory he would never forget.

       "Thank God. I was able to help you, when you needed help so much, little girl!" he said, half aloud.

       For surely she was safe now. He was the only man who had seen the face of the woman who had fled from that house of tragedy.

       Unless she had left behind some unsuspected clue!

       That fear suddenly swept over him. He must go to the house, must learn if anything had been discovered.

       Meredith reversed the car; the next moment he was proceeding rapidly in the direction of that house where little more than half an hour ago a man had been found, lying with upturned face in the pool of yellow lamplight, shot through the heart.

---

CHAPTER VI.
THE ROOM OF FEAR.

       "I ought to have asked her name, to have told her mine, in case of unexpected developments — in case she needs my help still," Meredith reflected with a sudden impatience, as the car carried him swiftly from Radyr station towards that house of tragedy.

       This house — Elmgrove Cottage its name was — stood detached in its own garden in the usually quiet road on the outskirts of Llandaff.

       It was a road that was far from quiet now. Where does a crowd gather from? Within a few minutes of the alarm being given, when the man-servant of Elmgrove Cottage had stumbled on the tragedy, and losing his head, had rushed like a madman, screaming and shouting, into the almost deserted road, as if by magic and as if from nowhere a little knot of people had begun to collect outside the gates, pressing against the railings, growing momentarily in numbers. There was the sound of hurrying feet, men, women, and boys running up to swell the gathering, excited crowd; the murmur of shrill-raised voices; a sea of white, eager faces staring at the house that was the magnet of their morbid curiosity; and at the gate a policeman holding back the swaying, murmurous throng, that pressed forward as though it wanted little encouragement to sweep in like an invading army.

       Inside the house behind the drawn blinds there were moving lights, and sometimes shadows of figures within the rooms outlined on the holland blinds, wavering and fantastically distorted — watched with tense, breathless eagerness by the crowd stretching out across the roadway.

       Coming up, Meredith overtook just on the outskirts of the crowd a cyclist, who had jumped off his machine, and was beginning to try to force his way through the packed mass of humanity.

       "Dr. Griffiths!" cried Meredith.

       It was the assistant of his friend. Dr. Morgan Powell. The man addressed turned at the sound of his name.

       "That you, Meredith?" he said. "How ever am I to get through this crowd? Here, make way — make way! I am a doctor; I have business in the house!" he cried impatiently to those on the outskirts of the crowd.

       "Stop, Griffiths. Can you leave your bike in charge of anyone?" said Meredith. "I can drive you in. They'll soon make way for the motor, and I want to go inside; probably the police at the gate wouldn't let me pass otherwise."

       "Right."

       The doctor spied a lad he knew.

       "Here, Johnny, I'll give you sixpence to look after my machine," he cried.

       Leaving the bicycle in the boy's care, the doctor jumped into the car. Meredith sounded the horn vigorously; slowly and reluctantly the crowd parted and made a passage.

       "Look! That's the chap what found the body, the dead man's servant!" one white-faced boy cried, pointing at the window as a shadow appeared on the blind — that of the head and shoulders of a man, a man who had raised a hand in gesticulation; it was palpable that he was trembling with excitement; the shadow of the hand on the blind, monstrously exaggerated, was perceptibly shaking.

       A hum of voices rose ceaselessly about the occupants of the car, as it made its slow passage to the gate.

       They say as it was a woman as shot him," Meredith heard one frowsy-looking female cry shrilly with a horrible, morbid relish; and another woman answered fervently: "Please Gawd, they'll nab her! Sure to nab her; she was seen running, and she couldn't ha' got far."

       Meredith shuddered. There was vivid in his mind the thought of a girl's white, terror-shaken face, the touch of shadowy masses of soft hair on his cheek: it was horrible that she should be coupled, even impersonally, with this sordid tragedy. At the gates the two constables on guard saluted, recognising the doctor. The car passed through into the short dark drive overshadowed by trees up to the house, followed by envious glances from the pavement and the road.

       There were trees all about the place, some of them so near the house that branches tapped the windows with every breath of wind with an indescribably mournful sound.

       Inside the house more of the police. The mounted sergeant whom Meredith had encountered before was in the hall as they entered, speaking through a telephone on the wall. It was due to the fact that there was a telephone in the house that the police had been so quickly on the spot.

       "Evening, sergeant," said Dr. Griffiths.

       "Sorry I couldn't come sooner. I was out when your telephone message came."

       "That's all right, sir. Dr. Sutcliffe was able to come. He's in the house now."

       The police-officer evidently recognised Meredith.

       "The second time we've met to-night, sergeant," said the latter. "Made any discoveries? Have you caught the woman?" Meredith forced himself to add.

       "No, sir; we have men out searching for her now. He's in that room, sir," he added to Dr. Griffiths. And the sergeant jerked a thumb across the little square hall to a door. He evidently referred to the dead man. "Dr. Sutcliffe's in there now."

       "Shot, I understand?" said the doctor, pausing.

       "Yes, sir; at close quarters. I believe. A pity he wasn't able after the shot to get to the telephone and tell us the murderer's name before he died. But he was killed instantly."

       Griffiths had turned to Meredith.

       "I think I should stay here, Meredith; it won't be a pleasant sight."

       And Griffiths strode forward to the indicated door; passed through, and the door was shut again.

       "Terrible affair this," said Meredith — "how did it happen, officer? Any clue?"

       He put the question in the most casual way. No one would have suspected from his manner, and certainly not the constable, that he was waiting with intense suppressed excitement for the answer.

       The sergeant shrugged his shoulders, and the expressive gesture brought a swift sense of relief to Meredith.

       Briefly the man related what was known of the crime. The dead man, a Mr. Percival Detmold, had been living here for some little time, a man of about thirty-six, a bachelor; little was known of him. He had one manservant, and a woman came in to work in the day time.

       To-night the manservant had been out; returning he paused to return a word with a constable in the road; then went into the house, letting himself in by a latchkey. Scarcely more than a minute later he came running down the drive from the back of the house, yelling like a madman, literally beside himself with terror, screaming out to the constable.

       "I had just ridden up then, and was speaking to the constable on the beat about a shot I'd heard," went on the sergeant — "when we heard him. At first the man couldn't speak coherently; he just jabbered. At last we got out of him that he had found his master lying dead. We went round at once. The man seemed to have lost his wits through sheer terror. It wasn't till some time after, five or six minutes I should think, that it struck him he had seen a woman bolting across the garden. If only he'd not broken down like a schoolgirl," said the speaker, with a professional contempt for "nerves", we should have had her. As it was, she had a clear five minutes' start."

       Meredith nodded without speaking. The door through which Griffiths had passed opened again; Griffiths and the other doctor appeared on the threshold, talking to an inspector.

       And behind in the lighted room lay what in life had been Percival Detmold, that man whom the woman of his thoughts had "feared and hated" — Meredith remembered the passionate words — "God knows for what good cause!"

       An hour ago the name would have had no meaning for him; living or dead, Percival Detmold was a stranger in whom he had no stirring of interest or concern. Now those questions that had been recurring in his mind since his drive from Radyr station — those questions — what errand had taken that girl to this house whose master lay dead in the room there, and what was the power he held over her? — seemed to focus in a sudden, resistless curiosity.

       Meredith strode forward; looked past Dr. Griffiths into the lighted room.

       The man was still lying there, half covered by a sheet that left the upturned face revealed.

       For all the tragic manner of his death, the face was quite calm; there was the suspicion of a smile still lingering about the thin, cruel lips, in the flood of light falling down from the big, shaded lamp, with hints still showing in that white, chiselled death-mask with the closed eyes of an evil life behind those gates of silence through which the dead had passed . . . . the man she had feared and hated. Outside the window the sprawling branch of a tree was tapping against the pane with a dreary monotony: tap — tap — tap, like impatient fingers signalling to ears that would never hear again.

       With a little shudder Meredith turned and passed into the hall again.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. In the conversation it is discovered that a thick veil, which the girl said she was wearing when in the grounds of the murdered man's house, is missing, and Jim shudders at the possibility of its being discovered by the police, and thus furnishing a clue. He says nothing of his fear, but resolves to return and look for it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold.

---

CHAPTER VII.
SOMETHING FAMILIAR IN THE NAME.

       In the hall the two doctors and the police-inspector were discussing the mysterious tragedy. Briefly, Griffiths introduced Meredith.

       Dr. Sutcliffe had been on the scene some time; he had completed a superficial examination of the dead man when Griffiths arrived. It was evident that the shot had been fired at close quarters; Griffiths endorsed his fellow-professional's conclusions; from the position of the wound it was possible that Detmold had fired it himself — only facts seemed to render the theory of suicide untenable. There were signs of a struggle in the room; some of the furniture had been over-turned. The weapon had been found lying on the floor near the dead man. The revolver proved to have been Detmold's property, and thus no clue was to be gained from the weapon.

       Mr. Detmold had been alone in the house at the time that his unknown assailant came; his one servant had gone out a couple of hours before, on some business for his master in Cardiff. The man's statement had been corroborated by police inquiries over the telephone. Questioned, the man said that he had not known if his master were expecting any visitors.

       "Who was he — this Mr. Detmold?" asked Meredith.

       It was an uncommon name, but in some vague way the thought had come to him that he had heard it lately.

       The inspector shook his head.

       We know very little about him, except that he came to Llandaff a couple of months ago and took this house. Always very pleasant spoken, and an educated man; but pretty close about his business, whatever it was. He always seemed pretty flush of money. The servant tells me that Mr. Detmold seemed to have business, but what he doesn't know, with some of the big mercantile firms in Cardiff. Used his telephone a good deal; went down frequently to see men on 'Change."

       "And respecting this woman who was seen running away?" asked Dr. Sutcliffe. "Had he many lady visitors?"

       "Adams — that's the servant — says not; none at all. The man's description of the figure he saw was so vague as to be useless. Now if he'd followed her there and then, instead of losing his head and rushing out to find the police — but it's no use arguing what a man ought to have done after it's all over," and the inspector shrugged his shoulders with philosophic resignation. "But he let the woman slip out of our fingers clean as a whistle."

       Meredith slipped away whilst the men were talking. He made his way through a door at the back. The French windows of the room where death hovered like an invisible presence overlooked the garden at the back. It was here that the girl he had been shielding had peeped in, to see what she had seen. Meredith looked across the wooded garden. It was across that lawn that she had been seen flying, towards the plantation of trees that skirted it. He could see a shadow moving vaguely among the trees, dimly lighted by the moon; then further away another moving shadow: figures of the police, still searching for the fugitive woman.

       "Well, she would be safe in shelter now; he had compounded the felony of helping her to escape — and he was glad of it. He walked slowly across the garden, trying to estimate the direction she must have taken in her flight, his eyes intently alert, searching on either side of him.

       The moon had risen; in its light he could see every sleepy leaf on the trees. Across the lawn, through a narrow opening in the tangled wilderness of rose bushes beyond, where some bruised, broken foliage hinted that someone had lately pushed a hurried way through, looking on either side of him more carefully than ever: his service had not ended when, he left her outside Radyr station. The thought that she might have left some tiny clue behind her filled him with apprehension.

       Meredith pursued his search, not expecting such success as this — but presently something fluttering on the trailing branch of a briar rose about the level of his shoulder caught his eye. A brown veil, that the thorny tendril must have rifled from her hat as she pushed, her way through; and his search was ended. Quickly he drew it from the thorn that held it; there was a faint perfume clinging to the strip of brown net that reminded him of a girl whose name he did not know. Meredith put it into his pocket, blessing his luck, and made his way back to the house.

       "Are you going to stay, Griffiths, or can I drive you back to Cardiff?" he said.

       But there was nothing to keep the doctor further.

       "No, I'm just going. But there's my bike, you know — if you can fix it up in the car?" said the doctor.

       "Yes, I expect so."

       It was a relief to Meredith to be out of the house with its tragic associations. Outside in the roadway the crowd seemed to be still growing denser; held by some morbid fascination.

       "They'll wait there half the night, though Heaven knows what pleasure they can find in waiting," growled Dr. Griffiths, impatiently, as the outskirts of the crowd were reached at last, and the car bore swiftly towards Llandaff and Cardiff. "If they had to witness as many horrors as I have, they'd be only too glad to keep out of the way of those in which they had no concern."

       And as if to dismiss the subject he began to talk about fishing; Griffiths was an enthusiast. On this occasion he found Meredith rather an abstracted listener.

       "I wonder where I've heard Detmold's name lately?" broke in Meredith suddenly, and apparently quite inconsequently, upon a fishing adventure of the doctor's — "but it isn't likely to be the same man; fancy I came across the name in print somewhere."

       The doctor relapsed into a huffy silence; and to this day Meredith does not know the end of the story — how Dr. Griffiths landed that famous trout.

       Meredith slowed down; ahead of them there were flares burning in the road, a dotted line of lights telling that one side of the road was up, calling for careful driving. Close by the hedge, in the shadow, where the highway had narrowed, a man was walking; as they came nearer, proceeding slowly, Meredith noticed that the man seemed to be walking with rather an unsteady lurch — a man who did not seem to be aware of the presence of the car, for as it glided past Meredith caught a glimpse of his face by the light of one of the flares, saw the strange, dazed look on it.

       "By Jove, did you see who that was?" Meredith said to the doctor. He stopped the car and jumped out, and ran up to the man, laying a hand on his shoulder.

       "Owen Hughes!"

       What followed was rather curious. A little, strangled cry broke from the man addressed he half turned a white, startled, unrecognising face to Meredith, and bolted precipitatedly, to the latter's amazement.

       "Why Hughes, man, what's up?" cried Meredith, staring in perplexity at the man plunging blindly forward.

       He ran after the stumbling, unsteady figure: caught him up.

       "Why, Hughes, what startled you so? You might take me for a ghost. Don't you recognise me after four years?"

       The man he addressed as Hughes looked at him in a dull, dazed way, raising his hand to his brow, as though he had only just realised who the speaker was. There seemed something odd about the man to-night; he might have been drinking — only that that had never been, one of Owen Hughes' failings, Meredith remembered.

       "Why, it's you, Meredith?" he said in a confused way; and the other man saw that he was evidently in a state of high, nervous excitement. "You — you startled me for a moment — I was in an abstracted mood; where did you spring from?"

       "From that car; where were your eyes man?" laughed Meredith. "Didn't see who it was till I almost passed you — and then you seemed determined to ignore our old acquaintance!"

       Griffiths had dismounted and sauntered up to them.

       "I — I never saw the car. The fact is, I've had a — a shock." He seemed to gulp the words out. I was on my way to see a man, and I've just heard on the way that he's been found dead. I — I was just going there to see if they'd found out anything."

       "You mean Detmold? We've just come from there," said Meredith. "He was a friend of yours?"

       "A friend?" Hughes seemed suddenly to flare out in a burst, of nervous, excited passion. "A friend? I tell you he was one of the biggest scoundrels unhung —–"

       The man checked himself suddenly, with a quick glance at the faces of the other two, as though he regretted an involuntary utterance. Meredith looked at him curiously. Hughes was the second person to-night who had spoken in these or similar terms of the dead man.

       "Look here, Hughes, you seem a bit unstrung — your nerves jumpy," Griffiths said, who had been watching the white, twitching face, and realised that the man was in a strangely excited mood. He wondered if Hughes had been drinking. "You'd better let as give you a lift back to Cardiff."

       "I heard that he — he had been shot. Have the police found out anything about it?" Hughes asked, ignoring the doctor's words.

       "Yes this much; someone was seen flying from the house," began Griffiths.

       Hughes started. He turned swiftly to the speaker.

       "Quick — tell me — what was he like, the man they saw?" he cried.

       "Look here, Hughes," said Dr. Griffiths in his matter-of-fact way with a gruff kindliness, "you're not yourself to-night; you're working yourself into a dangerously excited state — you always were an excitable person; come along back with us, and don't talk about this morbid thing. I can understand it was a shock to hear that a man you were on your way to see had been murdered; but don't let your mind dwell on it. It was a woman who was seen flying, but who she was no one knows. Don't let's mention Detmold again. It will bad enough to see the papers full of it to-morrow," the doctor added, as they walked back to the car. "Now if I ran a newspaper, I'd keep all horrors out of it. I'd just have reports of flower-shows, and a couple of columns devoted to fishing, and —–"

       Meredith interrupted with a laugh.

       "Wonder how soon you'd be trying to pay a shilling in the pound?" he cried. "Jump in, Hughes. I'd heard you were in Cardiff, and I was wondering when I should see you. Only been back a day or two myself."

       Owen Hughes was a man of about Meredith's own age; an old schoolfellow, with whom his friendship had outlived their schooldays, when Hughes had proceeded to a college for mining and engineering. A Welshman born and bred, Hughes was a distant relation of the Muirs, on Mrs. Muir's side. After serving his apprenticeship to an important firm, he had for some years filled the post of assistant mining engineer at some Aberdare collieries. This post he had thrown up in a fit of restlessness, to go to the States; from what he had heard since his return Meredith was inclined to think that Hughes had not done particularly well out there.

       A man Meredith liked — a man with abilities and counterbalancing weaknesses: there was weakness and lack of purpose, lack of grip, in the mouth and chin of the pleasant, good-looking face with the blue eyes and fair hair that so often accompany the Celtic origin.

       He and Meredith sat in front; there had always been a warm friendship between the two men, and it was evident that Hughes was genuinely glad to see Meredith again, though throughout the drive he was unusually silent; the shadow of that strange, excited mood in which they had found him seemed to lie across his usual gay spirits. But Meredith talked enough for two: of old boyish scrapes, recollections of their schooldays. But more than once during the drive to Cardiff, Meredith's thoughts seemed to wander from what he was saying, as though, in spite of himself, he could not banish the remembrance of that white, upturned face, with the sneer about the thin lips that Death had perpetuated — that mystery of the dead man with the name that had seemed dimly familiar, in which circumstances had involved him to-night.

       "Do you remember that day at Porthcawl — I wonder how often I've re-called that, when I've been sweltering in a humid heat of goodness knows what in the shade — when there was any shade! — out in India?" said Meredith, with a little laugh, wrenching his thoughts away from the dead man with a determined effort. "I used to find there was something pleasantly cool in the mere recollection of that wetting I had when the sailing boat heeled over. If you hadn't swum for me then, Owen, there'd have been no Jim Meredith here now to tell the tale!"

       It was something to laugh over now; but it had been very near tragedy at the time, ten years ago, when as boys with a decidedly limited experience they had tried to sail a fisherman's cobble, and the cobble had capsized. But for the pluck and nerve Owen Hughes had shown then Meredith would have been food for fishes. And though Meredith spoke lightly, there was an undertone of very real feeling in his voice now.

       "And what are you doing now, Owen?"

       It seemed that Owen Hughes was doing nothing at present. He began to hint at a disappointment, a sudden stroke of bad luck, that had dashed his hopes on reaching England some weeks ago; and into the vague story Detmold's name suddenly came; and as suddenly Hughes became reticent; broke off abruptly in the middle of the story, his eyes sombre, and with a frowning contraction of his brows.

       "Oh, don't let's talk about myself," he said moodily.

       "But it's just what I want to talk about, my dear chap," retorted Meredith. "At least, I want to say this. We are old friends, Hughes, and circumstances have been rather kind to me lately. I hope if you think of settling down in Wales and are looking out for a post, you'll come to me before you give anyone else the chance of retaining your services." He realised that Hughes who had a good deal of stubborn pride might hesitate about applying to Stephen Muir for a post; he had an idea that Muir rather disapproved of this distant cousin of his wife's.

       "Thanks, you're a good sort, Meredith. I won't forget. Where are you staying? I must look you up, and we'll have a chat — as I say, I had a shock to-night — I'm not myself. But I'm awfully glad to have seen you, old chap. Put me down, at the end of Cathedral-road. And, Meredith — do you think there's any chance of that — that woman being caught; the woman you say was seen at Detmold's place?" he asked suddenly.

       The question came so quickly and unexpectedly, was put with such odd eagerness, as to startle Meredith.

       No, I think not; I think pretty certainly not. I don't fancy the police have a clue at all."

       Meredith could almost have fancied there was a look of relief in Hughes' face — though how could it affect him? The car stopped, and Hughes got out. Meredith had already dropped Griffiths before Cathedral-road was reached; the doctor had a patient to see. He drove over the bridge, through the busier part of the city; there was a pleasant relief about seeing the lights and the crowded streets. Life was here in these busy thoroughfares — life and laughter and comedy. And to-night he had been brought face to face unexpectedly with tragedy and death. In the house in Roath Park Meredith sat up late that night, long after the Powells had retired, smoking and thinking; thinking of that house where a surging, excited crowd blocked the gate — thinking of that girl with fear in her eyes, of the man whose name seemed dimly familiar.

       It came upon Jim Meredith quite suddenly where he had encountered the name of Detmold before, and recently.

       He jumped up, and reached for the file of newspapers in which he had looked out the accounts of the case known in the press as the Black Pearl Affair — the case in which Olive Lindsay had been found guilty of theft and had been sentenced to six months' imprisonment: the girl who, but for her guilt in that affair, and not he, would have inherited his uncle, old Evan Meredith's interest in the firm of Meredith, Muir, and Son.

       He ran his finger down the report of the legal proceedings. Yes, as he had thought, the name of Detmold occurred. A Mr. Detmold had merely been one of the minor witnesses; he was the brother, it appeared, of the lady from whom the pearls had been stolen, staying with his married sister at her country house about the time of the theft.

       It was an uncommon name; could that witness and the man who was dead have been one and the same?

       In another account of the case that Meredith turned to the Christian name of this witness was given — Percival Detmold.

       And the dead man's name had been Percival Detmold.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. In the conversation it is discovered that a thick veil, which the girl said she was wearing when in the grounds of the murdered man's house, is missing, and Jim shudders at the possibility of its being discovered by the police, and thus furnishing a clue. He says nothing of his fear, but resolves to return and look for it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. . Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Driving to Cardiff he meets an old friend, Owen Hughes, who betrays much excitement at the mention of Detmold's name, and declares him "one of the biggest scoundrels unhung." Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay.

---

CHAPTER VIII.
THE UNANSWERED QUESTION.

       More than a week had passed since the inquest on Percival Detmold; the Great Western express was carrying Meredith towards London. It was the first opportunity which had presented itself since his return to Cardiff of going to inspect the house that his uncle had bought in Surrey, to live in, after his quarrel with his native city. This house and its contents had been left to Meredith along with the rest of the handsome fortune; and truth to tell, Meredith found it a bit of a white elephant.

       Nothing further had come to light respecting Detmold's death. At the inquest the jury had at first returned an open verdict, on the ground that, according to medical evidence, the wound might, possibly, have been self-inflicted; on further re-consideration after retiring again on the recommendation of the coroner, they had altered the verdict to one of murder or manslaughter on the part of some person unknown.

       The papers were full of the case; it was surprising how the reporters managed to fill so many columns with so little material. No motive that could have led to the crime had been discovered by the police, nor had any clue been forthcoming as to the identity of the woman whom Adams asserted he had seen making her escape at the back; in view of the man's condition of hysterical panic, a good many people came to the conclusion that the woman never actually existed outside his imagination.

       The dead man's sister, Mrs. Angeray (whose black pearls had been stolen in the sensational case of some twelve months ago), and her husband, the sole living relatives, happened to be abroad; but their solicitor came to Cardiff to be present at the inquest. The dead man's most intimate acquaintance in the neighbourhood seemed to be a Mr. Sarrol, a rich, influential man in Newport, who had a substantial finger in a good many speculations and companies. Mr. Sarrol being ill, did not attend the inquest.

       And now ten days had passed since the inquest, and as nothing new came to light, public interest in the mysterious affair had already begun to wane.

       Jim Meredith still had in his possession a woman's torn brown veil, which, had anyone but himself found it, caught on a briar rose in the dead man's garden, might have given new interest and life to the case; only Meredith kept his own counsel about that scrap of evidence of a woman's presence on the scene of the tragedy. He was still as far as ever from knowing its owner's name. He had not seen her since their parting at Radyr station; he thought it more than likely he would never see her again.

       The train was rushing swiftly along to London. Meredith expected to reach the remote Surrey village, Sevenways, about two in the afternoon; he would spend a night there, and return to Cardiff on the following morning.

       A fortnight ago the train had been carrying him home to Cardiff after four years in India.

       "And a pretty busy fortnight it's been," he said to himself, not without a feeling of satisfaction.

       He had been sticking hard at work, beginning to get a grip on the intricacies of the business to which he had succeeded. It had struck him that the Muirs had been a little inclined to hint, more by a slightly patronising, superior attitude than any actual words, that he had a good deal to learn in connection with it; just as he could not rid himself of the feeling that they entertained a vague, veiled sense of resentment that he had come into the business at all.

       Well, he was ready enough to admit that he had a good deal to learn — but he was developing a surprising aptitude for mastering the details one by one of the working of the great business with its many ramifications; and he found his long apprenticeship to another branch of engineering uncommonly useful. Not only had the attitude of the Muirs, real or fancied, put him on his mettle; he found everything connected with the business, whether relating to the skipping portion or to the collieries in the Rhondda Valley, surprisingly interesting — down to such a detail as the loading or unloading of one of the firm's vessels in dock, when stevedores' foremen would pick a gang from the crowd fighting for the chance of being taken on for the job.

       Since his return to Cardiff he had not seen Ethel Restarrick beyond that passing glimpse of her, the woman who had jilted him more than three years ago, in the street on the day of his home-coming; much more of the past fortnight had been spent in the neighbourhood of Bute-road and the docks than in Cardiff's West End; besides, he had heard a rumour that she was away visiting. In any case he felt little desire to see her. She had effectually killed the old spell that had once drawn him as by magic.

       In the intervals of work Meredith had been looking about for a place of residence. He hankered after that old house in Llandaff of which he had spoken to the Muirs; only for the present, at any rate, it was not available. He felt more than half inclined to accept the offer he had had of a furnished house at Penarth. It would be conveniently near the Yacht Club, and he would be able to move in practically at once.

       London was reached; he crossed from Paddington to Waterloo; finally the slow local train dropped him at a little wayside station in Surrey, where a smart dog-cart was waiting to drive him to the house two miles distant.

       From the station the white chalk road dropped in a leisurely, down-hill fashion through fresh, sweet-smelling country lanes, past straggling clusters of picturesque thatched cottages — that looked so extremely tumble-down through the climbing roses that covered their walls that probably the tenants ungratefully failed to appreciate their artistic effect — past the wide-rolling uplands, to the long, low, half-timbered house, with its great, overhanging gables and warm, mellow tiles, that stood backed by the Surrey hills.

       Since Evan Meredith's death two or three of the servants had been kept on, pending the new owner's decision — and that same new owner was decidedly perplexed what decision to come to.

       He wandered through the rooms — wide and low, with raftered ceilings, some of the rooms still with the great open hearths of a passed generation. A charming old house — unexpectedly charming: his uncle had been an admirable man of business, and with not enough artistic sense in all his composition to cover the proverbial threepenny-piece. It was evident to his nephew that the old man had given a free hand as regards the furnishing to the girl he had adopted. Everywhere in the house the subtle influence of a refined woman's taste seemed to proclaim itself in a hundred little feminine touches. This had been Olive Lindsay's home for nearly a year, until that terribly tragic affair that had made ruin of her young life.

       "I suppose there will be a photograph of Miss Lindsay somewhere in the house, Mrs. Norris?" Meredith asked the housekeeper.

       He felt a carious interest in this girl, an interest and a pity for that tragic figure who by one mad act had wrecked her future; and had thereby given him a fortune.

       "There used to be many, sir; but after — after the terrible blow, Mr. Meredith destroyed them all," the elderly housekeeper said. "It was a blow to all of us, sir — such a sweet, beautiful young lady, always bright and laughing and light-hearted; everyone liked her. The house never seemed the same since."

       "Have you seen or heard anything of her since she was released?" he asked.

       "No, sir; she never came near Sevenways after that. I never heard a word; none of those who used to know her hereabouts have I think."

       So old Evan Meredith had torn the photographs up. There was a tinge of hardness about Jim Meredith's lips as he thought of the stern, unforgiving old man, who after taking this girl to his heart had been able to uproot that love so utterly, to punish so cruelly her sin.

       Perhaps in some of the locked drawers he might come across a photograph. He rather hoped so. The line drawings given of her in the newspapers at the time of the affair were probably quite unlike her — obviously so, since the various sketches in the different papers could never have been taken for those of the same person. He was going through those drawers to-day; there were many personal letters and family papers that he had to overhaul.

       Meredith took the keys from his pocket, that had been in the lawyer's possession till his return from India, and sat down before an oak bureau in the library. He unlocked the flap, but for a time sat there in an abstracted mood of thought not disturbing the contents.

       Somehow in this house that had been her home, the home that this delicate girl had exchanged for a prison cell, the thought of her came more intimately and poignantly to this man whom her inexplicable act of her guilt had benefited so enormously.

       "Why on earth did she do it?" Meredith muttered impatiently to himself. It seemed so utterly inexplicable.

       He could have wished that his fortune had come to him by any other way than at the expense of that tragic, girlish figure that he could not get out of his thoughts. He thought of her, moving about this old house, laughing, happy, radiant, as the housekeeper had said — and then the bitter sequel: prison, and the social ostracism that must inevitably follow always.

       The housekeeper could tell him nothing of her since her release; Olive Lindsay had disappeared with her shame into the unknown. Why had she ignored the communications from Evan Meredith's solicitors, that letter which had been handed to her on her release, telling her of the dead man's legacy of a thousand pounds, bidding her communicate with them? She had deliberately chosen that her present retreat should remain unknown, had deliberately chosen to ignore the legacy: that seemed evident. But why?

       Meredith dragged himself out of his reverie; set to work on the letters and papers in the bureau.

       It was a long business going through the dead man's papers, putting on one side those that had to be kept. Amongst them he came upon no photograph of Olive Lindsay as he had half thought he might, but he found a little packet of letters in one corner that perhaps the hard, unforgiving old man had overlooked when he ruthlessly destroyed the photographs of the girl he could never have loved so much as his own pride. Letters that she had written to him — written from this old Manor House in Surrey when business had called him up for several days to Cardiff, signed, "your affectionate daughter, Olive."

       There was an unaffected charm about the letters that made an instant, direct appeal to the man who read them now: little intimate touches that seemed to give a hint of a sweet, womanly personality; and through them all the letters seemed to indicate an affection on the part of the writer that Meredith was ready to swear was not false or assumed. Letters that brought back the housekeeper's words to him: "Such a sweet young lady, always bright and laughing and light-hearted; everyone liked her" . . . . and that other thought: the girl standing in the dock, hearing her sentence . . . . Meredith put the little bundle of letters carefully into his pocket.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. In the conversation it is discovered that a thick veil, which the girl said she was wearing when in the grounds of the murdered man's house, is missing, and Jim shudders at the possibility of its being discovered by the police, and thus furnishing a clue. He says nothing of his fear, but resolves to return and look for it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Driving to Cardiff he meets an old friend, Owen Hughes, who betrays much excitement at the mention of Detmold's name, and declares him "one of the biggest scoundrels unhung." Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. Days pass and no clue is found to Detmold's murderer. Meanwhile, Jim Meredith goes to his late uncle's house in Surrey in search of information concerning Olive Lindsay.

---

CHAPTER VIII. (Continued.)
THE UNANSWERED QUESTION.

       Meredith was leaving by an early train the next morning.

       "I want you to start quarter of an hour earlier than you would have done," he said to the groom. "I want to call at the Rectory on my way to the station. The Rectory is not far off, I suppose?"

       "No, sir; just across the Green."

       It was a typical Surrey Green, with an ancient iron pump in the middle, the paint of it much the worse for time and weather, round which the houses of the village clustered, a picturesque, jumbled medley, big houses and small, dilapidated thatched cottages standing cheek by jowl. The Rectory was a large house standing back from the road, with a garden in front; and over the low, time-stained, red wall were trim flower beds full of London pride and sweet williams and pinks — the old-fashioned flowers that have come into fashion again. It struck Meredith that the Sector's hobby was his garden. The Rector was in it now, stooping to remove a predatory snail from one of the beds, and still in the stooping attitude he looked up as the dog-cart stopped outside his gate.

       "That's the parson hisself, sir — the Rev. Herries, sir," whispered the groom in a husky, sepulchral stage-aside that was audible for a dozen yards.

       Mr. Herries straightened himself and walked to the gate as Meredith jumped down; an erect man still for all his sixty odd years, with a refined, ascetic face and manners of delightful courtesy.

       "You are Mr. Herries the Rector, I think?" said Meredith. "I venture to intrude for a minute or two to ask if you can give me certain information. My name is Meredith. My uncle was Mr. Evan Meredith."

       "Come in, Mr. Meredith. I shall be only too delighted to do anything in my power, of course. Yes, I knew the late Mr. Meredith — it was sad that he only lived to occupy that beautiful old house of his so short a time," said the Rector, opening the gate. "And are we to have you for a neighbour?"

       Meredith smiled. As the Rector said, the Manor House was a beautiful old place; only it was in Surrey — and Cardiff was his home, where his work was, and his heart was.

       "No, I think not, Mr. Herries — not at least until they run trains from Sevenways to Cardiff within the hour! I am on my way to the station now; I only ran over from Cardiff yesterday — which is my excuse for intruding at such an early hour."

       "It is no intrusion, of course; I only wish you had been staying longer in Sevenways," the Rector said.

       "I wanted to ask you a question about Miss Lindsay — Miss Olive Lindsay," said Meredith. "Since you knew my uncle, you would, of course, know her?"

       The Rector nodded. The mention of the name seemed to have brought a sudden interested look to the fine face.

       "I am anxious to know if you can tell me anything of her. Since leaving prison she seems to have disappeared. My uncle left her a legacy, of which she was acquainted by the lawyers. She has ignored their communications entirely, which is rather strange, since I understand the poor girl was without means. I have never seen Miss Lindsay, but in view of her relationship towards my uncle, I feel in a measure a responsibility towards her!"

       "I am sorry I can give you no information, Mr. Meredith," the Rector said — "sorry for Miss Lindsay's sake. As you say, she has deliberately disappeared from the ken of all her friends, myself included. My wife and I were very sincerely attached to Miss Lindsay; it has been a distress to both of us that her pride — it can only be that — has led her to take this step." He spoke feelingly. "Poor girl, as though she could not have counted on our friendship and sympathy."

       "I am sorry you can't give me any information," said Meredith. "The whole affair was a most painful one, and seems quite inexplicable."

       "It is so inexplicable," said the Rector quickly, "for such an act was so alien to all her character that I have long since arrived at a definite opinion about the case."

       "You mean —–?"

       "This, and I say it, not forgetting the apparent strong chain of evidence: whoever committed that robbery it was not Olive Lindsay. I can offer no shred of proof in support of my assertion; who the actual culprit was I hare no idea. Only whoever it was," he said with a sudden emphasis, "I am convinced it was not Olive Lindsay. And nothing will shake that conviction."

.       .       .       .       .      .

       The Rector's vehement words were in Jim Meredith's mind as the train took him back to Cardiff — that assertion that had startled him immeasurably.

       Throughout, even whilst he pitied the girl, he had assumed that she must be guilty; the evidence had all pointed to her guilt. Old Evan Meredith had entertained no doubt; the lawyers had said that no doubt could exist in the matter.

       But what if some ugly miscarriage of justice had taken place? It would not be the first time that such a thing had happened. What if, strange as it might seem, Mr. Herries were right, and Olive Lindsay had been victim, not sinner?

       For no other reason than Olive Lindsay's apparent guilt in the charge brought against her, Evan Meredith had torn up the will in which he had left to her the bulk of his fortune, except a legacy of ten thousand pounds to his nephew, Jim Meredith.

       "I've got to leave my money to someone or something," the old man had said to the solicitors, as he destroyed the will — "and after all my nephew's a Meredith. . . He shall be my heir."

       He was Evan Meredith's heir solely because Evan Meredith, like the rest of the world, had been convinced of this girl's guilt. Could she have proved her innocence, the old man's intention to make her his heiress would have stood, that second will by which he had benefited would never have been made. Supposing for a moment that it were proved that Olive Lindsay was innocent, looking at it from a higher point of view than that of mere law, from that of honour, a scrupulous man of honour might ask himself the question: was he entitled to profit by such a miscarriage of justice? Had he any right morally — his legal right, of course, was indisputable — to Evan Meredith's fortune, beyond the ten thousand pounds bequeathed him in that first will?

       That was the question that exercised Jim Meredith's mind, as the train took him to Cardiff. And his answer to' it —–

       But he had no proof that Olive Lindsay was innocent. Merely the parson's conviction in face of a strong chain of evidence. No proof at all.

.       .       .       .       .      .

       Cardiff at last. Meredith walked thoughtfully out of the station, that unanswered question still in his mind.

       He was so deep in thought as he walked from the station entrance that he would never have seen the carriage with three ladies in it, if he had not heard a woman's voice speak his name.

       "Mr. Meredith! Stop, coachman."

       He recognised the voice before he saw the speaker, though it was more than four years since he had heard it.

       He looked up quickly, to see Ethel Restarrick leaning forward from the open carriage with a smile. Then a swift, startled look came into Jim Meredith's face, as his gaze swept past Mrs. Restarrick to fasten on one of her two companions in the carriage.

       The girl he had met so strangely on the night of Detmold's death — he was looking into her eyes now!

---

CHAPTER IX.
THE EYES OF A JEALOUS WOMAN.

       For a moment, as Jim Meredith's startled eyes encountered those of the girl whom he had met before under such strange circumstances, flying from a house whose four walls held the secret of a man's death, he was too much taken by surprise to cover an awkward pause; the meeting was so unexpected — doubly strange that Ethel Restarrick should be the means of bringing them together again.

       Almost instantly the girl averted her eyes — startled like his own, as he saw — though she maintained her composure admirably; Meredith as quickly pulled himself together. But he wondered, as he took Ethel Restarrick's gloved hand, whether her keen eyes had noticed anything.

       "You seemed determined to ignore your old friends," Mrs. Restarrick said, smiling; "it was uncomplimentary of you! Were your thoughts very absorbing?"

       "I shall have to give up the habit of thinking altogether, if it's going to cause me to pass my friends," Meredith answered, lightly — "they wouldn't all be so good-natured as you, not to punish my stupidity by driving on. How do you do, Mrs. Jardine?" he added, turning to the older lady in the carriage, who held out a plump hand to him.

       Plumpness and good-nature were Mrs. Jardine's two most obvious characteristics. She was a woman of 50, but no one looking at the comely, smiling face would have taken her for a day more than 40. A woman of many friends, whom everyone liked.

       "Welcome back to Cardiff, Mr. Meredith," said Mrs. Jardine. "My husband was speaking of you only to-day; we were talking of calling on you soon. Eve," she turned to the girl by her side, this is one of Cardiff's merchant princes — I suppose I may call you that Mr. Meredith? — it has such a prosperous enviable sound to us poor half-pay Army people!" she added with a laugh. "Mr. Meredith, this is my friend, Miss Kennedy, who is staying with me now — whom I think you have not met."

       "No, I have not had that pleasure," Meredith said; and his eyes met hers again and their hands touched. How strange to meet her again thus, to find himself being conventionally introduced to her by a mutual acquaintance, after that first strange unconventional meeting! "But then I have only been home a fortnight."

       "My husband is looking forward to seeing you," went on Mrs. Jardine, who had a way of monopolising the greater part of any conversation; "and I'm afraid he means to bore you talking India. He was in India seventeen years, you know; I tell him he left his heart out there — all I left was my complexion!" with a sigh that could not have been very genuine, for she had a charming pink and white complexion that many a younger woman might have envied — as no one knew better than Mrs. Jardine herself.

       Ethel Restarrick's eyes had seemed to watch Jim Meredith's face with rather a jealous gleam as he was introduced to Miss Kennedy — a fact that was not lost upon Mrs. Jardine. She was rather interested in this first re-meeting between Ethel and this man, whom the older woman shrewdly suspected had been in love with her before he went to India four years ago; and there was a twinkle of amusement in her eyes as the late Mr. Restarrick's young widow reproached Meredith smilingly for not having yet called to see her.

       "I am afraid I have neglected all my friends shamefully; but, really, I have been so busy since I came back," Meredith said. "At present I know rather less about the business than the youngest bill of lading clerk in the office — and that's galling to one's pride, isn't it? Besides, I heard you were away from home, Mrs. Restarrick."

       "Only for a few days, staying at Newport, with my sister Beatrice. But I shall be very angry if you let your new work have a greater claim on you than old friendships."

       Ethel Restarrick spoke lightly, but Mrs. Jardine, whose eyes did not miss very much, read a hint in the face turned to Meredith — a face whose beauty seemed to have grown harder and colder since her marriage — that was a trifle at variance with the careless tones. One cannot both have one's cake and eat it, but Mrs. Jardine wondered if this woman were satisfied now that she had eaten her cake, and perhaps found it less sweet than she had thought — wondered if Ethel hoped to win Jim Meredith back to the old allegiance that she at least had suspected four years ago.

       And so she watched the two interestedly, as one watches a comedy, and now at the beginning of the first act this wise woman of the world felt pretty sure that the curtain of the third would bring no such consummation. Ethel Restarrick might deceive herself, but Mrs. Jardine was not deceived, as Meredith politely answered that he hoped to avail himself of the privilege soon. No lover ever spoke in those tones; Mrs. Jardine had been a matchmaker too long not to have shrewd experience in a game of hearts.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. In the conversation it is discovered that a thick veil, which the girl said she was wearing when in the grounds of the murdered man's house, is missing, and Jim shudders at the possibility of its being discovered by the police, and thus furnishing a clue. He says nothing of his fear, but resolves to return and look for it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Driving to Cardiff he meets an old friend, Owen Hughes, who betrays much excitement at the mention of Detmold's name, and declares him "one of the biggest scoundrels unhung." Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. Days pass and no clue is found to Detmold's murderer. Meanwhile, Jim Meredith goes to his late uncle's house in Surrey in search of information concerning Olive Lindsay. He finds none, but meets the vicar, who declares his arm conviction of Olive's complete innocence. Returning to Cardiff he is met in the street by three ladies, a Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder, and whom he now has sufficient presence of mind to greet as an utter stranger.

---

CHAPTER IX. (Continued.)
THE EYES OF A JEALOUS WOMAN.

       "Of course, I am coming; I'm looking forward to a long chat," Meredith said, but no pulse stirred the quicker in him. A dead love like his had no chains; she had killed his love too surely when she had killed his faith. The broken illusions had been swept into a cupboard, and the key turned long ago. They lay there dust-covered, beyond hope of mending.

       He almost wondered at his own impassiveness, as he thought of their last parting. But between that parting and now lay like a dividing sword that letter she had sent him breaking off their engagement, telling him of her impending marriage.

       Meredith could remember every word of that letter — the rags of self-exculpation with which she had tried to veil her motives. She had hinted vaguely that it was to please her people; that they had practically driven her into the marriage — all the old threadbare excuses: it would have been too humorous to have pretended that she loved the man she was marrying — the elderly, dried-up, shrivelled little man of money.

       Two years after Ethel's marriage her sister had married too; someone had sent him out a paper with the account of the wedding; it had reminded him ironically of the woman who had jilted him — for Beatrice Lloyd had also "married well" in the cant phrase — and Jim Meredith had wondered with a bitter smile if the same motives had actuated both sisters, a family trait? He could not somehow imagine John Sarrol, of Newport, inspiring romantic affection.

       This woman had played fast and loose with him once; but Mrs. Jardine's estimate was right — she would not have another chance of doing so.

       "I have just come up to Cardiff to-day from London, or rather from Surrey," he went on — "a little place with the queerest name in the world, Sevenways — why, you don't know it, Miss Kennedy?" he cried.

       She had made a little impulsive movement; her eyes were suddenly turned on him, with involuntarily parted lips as if she were about to speak. But if so, she checked the impulse almost as he put the abrupt question to her. For a moment she did not answer.

       "Oh, I know parts of Surrey a little," Eve Kennedy said, disregarding the question. "Do you mean the house or the village is called Sevenways? What a curious name. Where is it?"

       "Tucked away under the Surrey Hills, with a green in the middle of the village, and old thatched cottages smothered in climbing roses, and a delightful old Manor House there, that was my uncle's, that I've fallen in love with. Mrs. Jardine, what does one do with white elephants?"

       "Do you mean the Manor House? Is it a very white one?" she smiled.

       "'Fraid so. But it's a charming old house. There's a date carved somewhere in a stone over a doorway, only the second figure's crumbled away, so one might easily be a century out in one's calculation of its age; and there are raftered ceilings of old brown oak and deep-recessed, tiny-paned windows — I could go on talking about the house until your coachman expired on his box with chagrin at my keeping the horses waiting so long!" he laughed.

       He paused, as a mutual acquaintance, a young man very sprucely dressed, with an eye-glass and a somewhat fatuous smile, strolled up to them, raising his hat.

       "Hullo Bobby!" said Meredith with a nod; the name seemed to fit the newcomer like a label. His surname might have been a superfluity — no one ever dreamed of calling him by it. "Well, good-bye Mrs. Jardine. Good-bye Mrs. Restarrick. I'm afraid I've detained your carriage an unconscionable time; but for Bobby's opportune arrival goodness knows how long I should have gone on talking. Good-bye, Miss Kennedy." The strangeness of meeting her again like this: all through his talk with Ethel and Mrs. Jardine Meredith's mind had been running on that. It was almost as though, fate had intervened to throw them together again. "I'll take Bobby along with me," he added gaily; "or he'll probably detain you further, so that you will never reach your destination at all!"

       "Here, that's all very fine, Meredith," protested the young man. "I call that being a dog in the manger, by Jove, don't you, Mrs. Jardine? And that reminds me. Meredith, I've got another bone to pick with you — for cutting me the other night."

       "Sorry. When was that? I don't remember."

       "Well, it's some time ago now; the night that Detmold was shot," and the smile suddenly died from Meredith's face; but the words gave him no premonition of what was coming. "I was running to catch a train, just as you were driving Miss Kennedy up to the station at Radyr in your motor, don't you know?" said the younger man with a laugh. His laugh was celebrated in Cardiff. Its sheer, fatuous inanity would have been a valuable asset to any comedian in musical comedy.

       Tact, of course, was the last thing to be expected of the speaker; and indeed under ordinary circumstances there would have been nothing in the remark. As it was, Meredith felt a cold chill pass through him. Though he had not seen Bobby, evidently the latter had caught a glimpse of the girl as she left his car that night: could anything have been more unfortunate?

       He and Miss Kennedy had just now tacitly professed to meet as complete strangers; he saw Ethel Restarrick look from him to the girl with a sudden, suspicious glance, swift to notice the discrepancy. Mrs. Jardine looked puzzled. He did not dare to look at the girl's face. Meredith could have kicked the unconscious Bobby with pleasure.

       He most save the situation somehow; for the girl's sake he must remove if possible, the impression left by the words, and the construction that would inevitably be put upon it, that would reflect on her. Meredith's code of honour would not have permitted him to lie to save himself; but he must lie now to save her.

       "What on earth are you talking about, Bobby, in your charmingly irresponsible way?" he cried, with scarcely a moment's hesitation, forcing a laugh. "I drove a lady certainly to Radyr station one night — perhaps the night you refer to; only you are mistaken as to the lady."

       Bobby stared at him incredulously.

       "Quite mistaken, of course," added Meredith hurriedly, to check Bobby's evident impulse to speak. "I have only just been introduced to Miss Kennedy. To-day is the first time I have heard her name."

       Meredith did it very well; his manner was easy and assured. Miss Kennedy laughed; and with her laugh that sounded quite natural he felt with relief that the situation was saved. He looked at her and her eyes thanked him.

       "But —–" began Bobby blankly; then stopped suddenly, as though it had dawned upon him uncomfortably that, whatever the facts might be, the tactful thing for him to do was to admit an error. Which he accordingly did rather awkwardly.

       Meredith stole a look at Ethel Restarrick's face. It had suddenly grown cold and hard. Was she convinced?

---

CHAPTER X.
THE SPIN OF A COIN.

       "Good-night, Meredith — and ever so many thanks."

       "That's all right. See you to-morrow about what we've been talking of. Only consider it quite settled, you know."

       The two men stood at the door talking for a minute or two longer before they shook hands and parted. Hughes walked with a buoyant step along the path to the gate, his head erect, and with a confident, elated look in his face — he did not look the same man as that Owen Hughes whose strange, excited manner had puzzled Meredith when, motoring from Detmold's house, he had met his old schoolfriend. Meredith stood looking after him a. moment before re-entering the house.

       "Lucky that vacancy occurring at the collieries," he said to himself — "I'm glad I can do Hughes a good turn. And he's just the man for the post, though I expect Muir will jib a bit when I tell him the thing's settled."

       And at the same moment Owen Hughes was saying to himself with a smile:

       "Stephen Muir would never have offered me the job!"

       Meredith had offered him a post at the firm's collieries in the Rhondda Valley, that had become unexpectedly vacant — a good post that would lead to still better things.

       Characteristically, Meredith had made up his mind in a hurry, and had closed with the offer of the furnished house at Penarth; he had not only decided to take the house, but had taken possession within four days of his return from Sevenways. The place suited him, standing high up not far from the restored old church on the headland: a comfortable house, not too big for a bachelor's requirements, standing in a pleasant, shut-in garden, with green trellis covering the white walls, up which jessamine grew that almost covered one side of the house.

       Owen Hughes had dined with him to-night, and at dinner the host had broached the question of this vacancy.

       "Stephen Muir would never have offered me the post," Hughes said to himself again, as he walked out of the gate. A church clock was chiming half past six. They had dined early; and Hughes had come away directly after, as Meredith had an appointment.

       Owen Hughes had never got on very well with Stephen Muir, though owing to the tie of his relationship with Mrs. Muir, he had been intimate with the family since boyhood, and was frequently at the house. His feet had turned almost instinctively towards the Muirs' house now, as he walked along the cliff road, by the Windsor Gardens, in the Lavernock direction.

       It was a big, imposing house, standing back from the road, with great iron gates opening on a long carriage sweep and trim wooded grounds. Hughes walked past the gates, hesitated, and walked on, as if undecided whether to go in or not. His first impulse had been to go to the house; he wanted to see Elsie Muir, wanted her to be the first to hear the news of his good luck; he knew that she would be glad. But it was nearly seven o'clock — an awkward hour, for the Main dined at half past; and perhaps Elsie would De upstairs dressing for dinner. He walked irresolutely past the gates; and as irresolutely paused at the end of the road. As he looked back he saw Philip Muir, Stephen's second son, ride up to the gates on his bicycle and pass through.

       Stephen Muir was a self-made man who worshipped success; and Hughes knew that it was mainly because he, after throwing up a good appointment at the Aberdare collieries to try his luck abroad, had not done particularly well in the States, that Stephen Muir had dubbed him a rolling-stone — and to be a rolling-stone was a crime in this ambitious, successful man's eyes.

       "But after all I have worked hard," Owen said to himself suddenly — "which is more than Philip there has ever done; and my knowledge and experience are worth money in the open market any day — which Stephen certainly cannot say for his second son! If only Detmold had played straight by me — but it's no good thinking of that now; I've got to swallow my disappointment"; and a frown came into his face. "Now I've got this chance Meredith's given me, and I'm going to make the most of it, and perhaps some day ——"

       Perhaps some day it might lead him to the realisation of that dream that was in his thoughts now as he looked towards the house where Elsie Muir lived.

       "Shall I go in? I might perhaps catch a glimpse of her for ten minutes," thinking of the girl round whom that dream was woven, though he had given her no hint of it by spoken word. "I'll toss for it. Heads — yes; tails — no."

       Owen Hughes spun the coin. It was a head that lay upward in the roadway. And he laughed.

       "That settles it."

       He walked towards the gate.

       The spin of the coin — a trivial thing to alter the whole of a man's destiny. Perhaps fate laughed, knowing how the mere chance of that upturned "head" in the roadway was to alter all Owen Hughes's future.

       He walked through the gate.

(TO BE CONTINUED ON MONDAY).

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays in expression and movement great distress of mind, plainly fearing and flying from something. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. In the conversation it is discovered that a thick veil, which the girl said she was wearing when in the grounds of the murdered man's house, is missing, and Jim shudders at the possibility of its being discovered by the police, and thus furnishing a clue. He says nothing of his fear, but resolves to return and look for it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Driving to Cardiff he meets an old friend, Owen Hughes, who betrays much excitement at the mention of Detmold's name, and declares him "one of the biggest scoundrels unhung." Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. Days pass and no clue is found to Detmold's murderer. Meanwhile, Jim Meredith goes to his late uncle's house in Surrey in search of information concerning Olive Lindsay. He finds none, but meets the vicar, who declares his arm conviction of Olive's complete innocence. Returning to Cardiff he is met in the street by three ladies, a Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder, and whom he now has sufficient presence of mind to greet as an utter stranger. While conversing with the ladies a mutual acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. The mutual acquaintance subsides, but Ethel Restarrick grew cold and hard. Was she convinced? Meredith takes a house at Penarth, where Owen Hughes meets him and accepts a post in the Rhondda collieries of Meredith's firm. Afterwards Hughes calls upon Elsie Muir, with whom he is in love, and that incident opens a new chapter in his life.

---

       "When the Great Judge is pronouncing sentence, of what avail will it be then to cry: 'The Woman Tempted Me'?"

CHAPTER XI.
THE LURE OF A GIRL'S EYES.

       Instead of following the carriage-drive, Owen made his way across the lawn towards the house. It was a large, square-built house, this of Stephen Muir's, with a verandah running round two sides of it, upon which French windows opened.

       As he approached the house across the springy turf, wondering if he would be able to snatch a few minutes with Elsie before the solemn function of dinner, from one of the open windows came the notes of a girl's clear, young voice and the strains of a piano; and he followed the direction of the song — it was one of the old Scotch songs that Elsie loved; he walked softly along the verandah to the open window.

       He was in luck's way. She was in the room alone, making a picture for his eyes to linger on in her white dress, the simplicity of which suited the girl's slim figure. Owen had tiptoed to the window silently, but she turned her head and saw him as if instinctively; and the song ended abruptly, and Elsie jumped up from the music-stool and came across the room to him with a smile — a girl with soft hazel brown eyes, and masses of fair hair that might have borrowed their colour from ripening corn; but it was the expression that lent the subtle charm to the animated, piquant face with its delicate wild-rose tint.

       "Owen! I didn't know I had an audience," she cried.

       "Please finish your song. You mustn't cheat your audience out of the last verse."

       She smiled and went back to the piano. Owen stood out on the verandah, his eyes looking into the room, bent on the graceful figure, with the rounded neck rising out of a foam of dead-white muslin, and the proudly poised head crowned with its glory of soft hair, which the rays of the setting sun, slanting through the open window, caught and seemed to touch to flame. Her voice stole out to him, threading like a shuttle through the fabric of his thoughts.

       And as the cadences floated out into the silences of the summer night, Owen Hughes found himself wondering if she dreamed, that white girl there, how often when thousands of miles away from Penarth he had thought of her. He had known her so long — knew the sweet, womanly nature so well, knew what infinitely tender sympathies and gentleness underlay the brightness and laughter with which she was always associated in his thoughts.

       Had she ever thought of him, too — other than as the chum of those old days of short frocks? Did she know that in his heart he wanted a greater gift than the sweet intimacy of their old boy and girl friendship? And now this post that had been offered to him, this unexpected chance, better than he had dared to expect, had made that old dream seem among the possible things; unless — –

       Just for a moment a shadow seemed to pass between him and that peaceful, sunlit interior and the slender figure in white; and Owen caught his breath sharply, as a thought came to him swiftly, intruding like an unwelcome guest on those other pleasant thoughts and dreams: the thought of that secret that the dead man Detmold could have told, which if it were known would rise like a barrier between them inexorably; and his hand tightened on the railing of the balcony . . . . only those dead lips could not speak; the thing in his mind, that sudden, jarring thought, could never now be a menace to come between him and this girl he loved. Why should he give up his dream for that? The last words of the song died away; the girl came towards him, picking up her shimmering cobweb of a wrap, which she flung over her head and shoulders. She crossed out on to the verandah and stood there, one bare elbow of the smooth, white, rounded arm resting on the balustrade.

       "I thought it must be Philip when I turned round with a sudden feeling that someone was peeping into the room; I never expected to see you," she told him.

       "I've been dining with Meredith in his new house near St. Augustine's — and I couldn't resist coming in here after leaving him. I wanted to see you for a few minutes, though I hesitated, as it so close on your dinner hour."

       "Oh, it wants a long time to dinner yet — we're not dining to-night till eight. How lucky I happened to dress early to-night."

       "Very lucky for me. I wanted to tell you something, Elsie — I wanted you to be the first to hear my news. Shall we walk across the lawn? It would be a shame to go indoors on such a night," he said, rather jesuitically; he did not want this stolen ten minutes with Elsie to be broken in upon by her brothers or mother.

       She acquiesced smilingly.

       "If that is the only condition on which you'll tell me your news, after piquing my curiosity!" she said with her pretty, low laugh.

       Together they walked slowly across the lawn. A sense of brooding peace lay over the garden, that slumberous stillness that falls with the close of a day.

       Beyond the lawn were trees — old, old trees, whose spreading arms made a dim green twilight beneath, a leafy canopy for the rustic seat partly hidden from the house by a clustering syringa starred with creamy white blossoms. As the man and the girl walked to the seat, a break in the trees gave them a view of the sea, beyond the headland, glimpses of passing brown sails in the sunset scarcely filling in the summer wind — a faint wind that, as it rustled through the massed foliage, seemed to bring with it a sound of the sea from which it had wandered.

       He had known she would be glad of his news; the way the eager, winsome face lighted would alone have told him without the need of words.

       "Jim Meredith's a good sort," went on Owen; "and coming into this money hasn't changed him or spoiled him. Only it isn't altogether because of our friendship; he said I was just the man for the post, and he meant it — and I'm going to show him that he is right!"

       And he laughed, and there was a look of elation in his face — a singularly attractive face, in spite of the hint of weakness and indecision that the mouth and the chin betrayed — as he thought that this might be the beginning of the bridge to lead him to her.

       His eyes wandered across the garden, to return steadily to her; behind her the petals of the syringa blossom were falling, wind-stirred, fluttering like pale moths through the dim twilight where the roof of green boughs cast its shadow, weaving a white carpet for her feet.

       "Oh, I'm so glad, Owen; and, of course, Mr. Meredith was right. I'm sure he could not have a better man for the post," she cried. "I wonder if your father will think so, too, Elsie? I hope so, because ——"

       He checked himself, looking at her. He had not the right to speak yet, to tell why this appointment had made him chiefly glad; only the words had nearly escaped him then. The temptation had come upon him with a sudden, almost irresistible rush. He had always kept those deeper feelings resolutely in hand; but to-night his resolution seemed suddenly to need a stronger effort.

       "Why shouldn't he?" the girl said. "And, at any rate, you will be able to convince him by your work. I am quite sure of that."

       "Your encouragement makes me still more hopeful," he said, in a low voice; "and it means so much to me, this — it brings me nearer to the realisation of a dream."

       "What, dream, Owen?"

       She did not guess his meaning. The frank directness of her eyes told him that. And his words had taken them over the brink of dangerous ground; he realised that, too. But a sudden temptation swayed his senses; his resolutions seemed to be slipping from him; for a moment he had not himself in hand.

       "Don't you know that you — make others dream?" he said in a low tone, with a note of passion surging up in his voice, leaving it hardly under his control.

       A startled look had come into her face; a sudden flush of colour dyed it as she looked at him and swiftly turned her eyes away. He had not meant to speak to-night; perhaps it was the man's inherent weakness of character betraying itself that he let the sudden temptation conquer that resolution, perhaps before he had the right.

       "Elsie, don't you know that I care for you — how much I care?" he broke out, bending closer to her, making a prisoner of the little white hand. his face so near to hers that a wind-blown strand of the soft hair brushed his cheek, making his blood tingle at the touch. "Dear, I expect I have no right to tell you this, before I've taken up the post, before I've shown what stuff I'm made of; I didn't mean to tell you — yet. Only now you know; and I'm glad I've spoken — glad!" his voice shaken with a rush of tenderness. "Elsie, tell me — do you care a little, too?" he whispered.

       For a moment the girl did not speak. Her face was turned away, staring out before her through the rain of shaken, falling white petals; there was a dawning, wondering look in the wide eyes — a wonder, and strange, tremulous lights. And still not looking at him she said, in a low, changed voice from the voice he had known —

       "But — I never dreamed of your — your caring for me like this. I never thought of it. You see, I have known you all my life."

       "I think I've cared for you all my life, Elsie; have you nothing else to say to me? Oh, I know I have no right, perhaps, except the right that love gives; you the daughter of a rich man, and I ——"

       She turned to him quickly at the words.

       "Oh, money'" and there was a flick of scorn in her voice. "But when a woman cares for a man, she doesn't wait to think about money, whether he's rich or poor — if she really cares."

       "Elsie! Does that mean that you care?" he cried suddenly. "Let me see your face —" for the wistful face was suddenly bent very low. "Your eyes shall tell me!"

       He stood before her, holding her two unresisting hands in his, and drew her to her feet, drew her towards him. Then she raised her eyes — moist now and shining, and very bright; and there was a smile about the tender curves of the tender mouth. And he cried suddenly:

       "You do care — you do care, after all!" with a wild glad wonder, as though he could hardly realise his good fortune. And in an instant his arms were about her, holding her tight to him. "Tell me that you care."

       "I do care — oh, I think that I must always have cared: I feel that, as though I had cared all my life," she whispered shyly — "only — only I didn't realise until now that I cared — in this way."

       The joy of possession thrilled him, as he looked down into the sweet, winsome face, into the brown, eyes that had told him their secret. He bent his head lower, kissed the wind-blown strand of hair that lay across her cheek, kissed her mouth. She cared for him — what a wonderful thought that was! And to his lips rose instinctively the sweet old Welsh words of endearment that perhaps sound tenderer, when spoken by lovers, than any words in any other language.

       "Sweetheart, I suppose I shan't wake up and find it all a dream — that you've made me the happiest man in all Wales!" he whispered, with a low laugh of happy triumph.

       "It's a reality that's a sweet dream, too, this our love — a dream we shall keep all our lives!" she answered softly.

       To keep all our lives! As she was by his side now, sweet, winsome, the perfection of womanhood, so when once the waiting months were bridged she would be at his side all through their future life. Nothing could cast a shadow on their happiness, he told himself confidently. She cared for him! Then presently, as they lingered there, a clock chimed, and Elsie started up out of a world of enchantment to realise almost incredulously that it was half-past seven.

       "Is it so late?" she cried. "What a pity anyone is coming to dinner — and that we shall have to part. I'm afraid I shall have to run away soon, dear."

       "Who is coming?"

       "The Sarrols. I expect they may be here any time."

       For a moment a shadow crossed his face. The name of Sarrol reminded Owen Hughes of Detmold; and he didn't want to think of Detmold to-night of all nights — the dead man who had not played straight, who had defrauded him of his share in something that might have brought him a small fortune. He had trusted Detmold entirely, to find out at last that his implicit trust had been misplaced; that the man was a scoundrel, who had cheated him. And now Detmold was dead, and that circumstances would prevent him from establishing his claim.

       Had John Sarrol been in league with Detmold to defraud him, or had the man, in approaching Sarrol, in obtaining the latter's financial backing in the scheme, as Hughes had found out was the case, left his name out of the transaction altogether? It was odd that Sarrol had not answered his letter.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays great distress of mind. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. Having left the girl, at her request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. Days pass and no clue is found to Detmold's murderer. Meanwhile, Jim Meredith goes to his late uncle's house in Surrey in search of information concerning Olive Lindsay. In Cardiff one day Jim is greeted in the street by three ladies, a Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder, and whom he now has sufficient presence of mind to greet as an utter stranger. While conversing with the ladies a mutual acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. The mutual acquaintance subsides, but Ethel Restarrick grew cold and hard. Was she convinced? Meredith takes a house at Penarth, where Owen Hughes meets him and accepts a post in the Rhondda collieries of Meredith's firm. Afterwards Hughes calls upon Elsie Muir, with whom he is in love, and that incident opens a new chapter in his life. Hughes declares his love, for Elsie, and is accepted. Leaving the house, he meets Sarrol, whom he suspects of having been in league with Percival Detmold to defraud him (Hughes).

---

       "When the Great Judge is pronouncing sentence, of what avail will it be then to cry: 'The Woman Tempted Me'?"

CHAPTER XI. (continued.)
THE LURE OF A GIRL'S EYES.

       But it was futile to dwell on this. His wisest plan would be to accept disappointment, not brood over it. He had trusted Detmold so implicitly that, when the man turned out a rogue, he, Owen Hughes, had nothing beyond his bare word to establish his claim to a share in what Detmold had sold and Sarrol bought; he realised that. He could prove nothing. And Sarrol had ignored his letter, evidently meant to ignore that claim he could not prove.

       Almost as the girl spoke they heard the approaching sound of a motor-car.

       "That may be the Sarrols. I must run away, Owen, now — I only wish I hadn't to! If I'm very silent at dinner it will be because all my thoughts are with you!" she whispered. "But you'll come to-morrow, and, Owen, I think we won't tell dad just yet, because — because I want you to have taken up your new post, to have shown him what you're capable of when you have the chance, before he knows."

       For an instant he held her in his arms and then she was gone; he stood back among the trees watching her.

       A moment later the great yellow and black car came up the drive. The girl stood on the steps by the door to greet Mrs. Sarrol as she got out of the car. Owen lingered among the trees with his eyes on the girlish figure in white.

       John Sarrol shook hands with Elsie; a big, red-faced man, with coarse, sensual features, and a square, masterful jaw; far from an attractive face, with small eyes set too closely together, and the habitual cynical look about the mouth; far from an attractive personality also — as those brought into business relation with this rich, domineering man knew.

       "How do you do, Miss Muir? I'll take the car round to the motor-house — no, don't trouble to send anyone. I know the way."

       Mrs. Sarrol passed inside the house with Elsie — a pretty woman, whose good looks had inevitably suggested the title for husband and wife of Beauty and the Beast in Newport; John Sarrol took the car round.

       Owen stood watching him from among the trees with a look of resentment clouding his eyes. Why had not the man at least answered his letter? — this man who was going to exploit and make money out of the very scheme in which, could he but have proved his claim, he, Owen, should have had a half share.

       But he resisted his first impulse to go out and accost the man. He could prove nothing; and he could not trust himself to keep his temper if he spoke to Sarrol: best to reconcile himself to his disappointment once and for all — he realised that it would be the wisest thing in the end. And to-day had brought him his chance — and Elsie loved him. He would wipe this disappointment clean off the elate, forget it.

       He had not expected Sarrol would see him. standing back among the trees, half hidden as he was; but the latter's eyes were uncommonly keen; Sarrol gave an unmistakable start — it was whispered that Sarrol drank; certainly his nerves seemed a little ragged now — as he suddenly caught sight of the motionless figure among the trees watching him; recognised who the man was.

       Coming upon Hughes suddenly had startled Sarrol — unduly, perhaps owing to those ragged nerves of his — and a sudden, unreasoning anger seized him against the cause of that nervous start.

       "Who the devil are you, skulking there?" he cried, with the gust of anger of a man who had been drinking, though he had recognised Hughes before he spoke; and perhaps the knowledge that he was deliberately guilty of sharp practice towards Hughes added fuel to the flame of his irritability. "Why don't you come out and show yourself?"

       Owen Hughes took fire at the words. He forgot his prudent resolutions; he strode out quickly — walked up to Sarrol with a passionate gleam in his eyes, stung by the taunt.

       "If you haven't learnt ordinary decent manners at your age, Mr. Sarrol, I suppose, you never will now," he flashed out. "And that's no doubt why you haven't answered my letter. Well, you are going to give me an answer now!"

---

       " . . . . A silence that can be baser, crueller than any lie! You can fight a lie — but silence? You've no weapons to fight that! It's like crying your appeal over the world's edge — not even an echo comes back . . . "

CHAPTER XII.
JOHN SARROL WHISPERS.

       John Sarrol, one of the richest men in Newport, or, for that matter, Monmouthshire, and, in his own estimation at least, one of the most important, stared at the speaker for a moment or two, as though incredulous of his own ears. There was a blunt directness about Owen Hughes's speech that he was unused to — this self-important, domineering man, who was more accustomed to servility and truckling; and he gasped at this hot-headed young Welshman's challenge. His red face seemed to grow still redder, the veins standing out on his thick bull neck.

       "What the devil do you mean?" he broke out violently, when at last he could recover from his astonishment to find words. That this man, a mere struggling mining engineer, dependent on his profession for his living, and out of employment just now, should dare to speak to him in such terms. "You insolent dog —–"

       Hughes drew a step nearer to the big, beefy man, and John Sarrol drew back a step before the gesture and the dangerous flash in the young man's eyes. He was singularly light and agile on his feet for one of his bulk. For a moment be half expected a blow. He watched Hughes warily.

       "I'm not going to stand that kind of talk from you or anyone else," Owen said in a low voice, with apparent coolness, though inwardly his resentment was burning at white heat. "I mean just what I say. I wrote to you a fortnight, ago. Why haven't you answered? I wrote to you because I had heard that you were about floating a company to put on the market a new anti-fouling paint for the under-water part of vessels; a preparation that, in the first instance, Detmold introduced to your notice — am I right?"

       "I seem to remember getting such a letter on the day of Detmold's mysterious death," said Sarrol, with a smiling, deliberate insolence, looking hard at the younger man. "Really, the letter did not seem to call for an answer.

       "I think it did," said Owen in a low, determined voice.

       Earlier this evening he had decided that it would be wisest to wipe off the whole affair as a bad debt, and accept the situation without further ado. But that was before Sarrol's insolence had goaded him to forgetfulness of prudence.

       "You've been making experiments for a considerable length of time with this fouling-preventatiive on vessels you have an interest in; and you're satisfied that the preparation does what it claims, and that there's money in it — and you accordingly agreed to buy it from Detmold. But in my letter I told you that what I had discovered Detmold was selling to you was only partly his; that I owned an equal share in that trade-secret."

       "I know you told me that. I remember you didn't furnish any proofs," said Sarrol with a malicious gleam in the heavy face. "And in any case it was more a matter for Detmold than for me —–"

       "But Detmold is dead, and —–"

       "Yes; Detmold is dead," and there was an odd look in the other man's close-set eyes, resting on the other man meaningly. "And I have only your assertion for the share I understand you claim in the purchase-money. It was Detmold who approached me months ago about the matter; Detmold throughout with whom I have dealt. Your name was never mentioned to me in connection with it at all. Now when Detmold is dead you bring forward this impudent claim!"

       And he gave a laugh, and would have passed on.

       "Stop, Mr. Sarrol," said Hughes, interposing. He would have this threshed out now. His face was pale and determined. "That's not true. I wrote to you stating my claim before Percival Detmold's death. And after your receiving my letter — on the very day — Detmold went to see you at Newport. I had found out he was selling me, and I had threatened to make things awkward if he didn't play straight; that was why he went over to see you that day. He made a slip and let that out afterwards. So you see, you can't treat me as you should like to, as an impostor.

       Sarrol shrugged his shoulders. He gave a short laugh.

       "I ask again, what proof have you? Assertions are nothing. I am a business man. I want proof."

       And Owen Hughes had no proof.

       It was easy now to look back and realise what a fool he had been, how insanely unbusinesslike. He had left everything in Detmold's hands, because he was honest himself, and he expected honesty in others; he had trusted Detmold.

       It was a story dating back more than a year. In the States he had come across a man who confessed to have hit upon a preparation for preventing the parasitical growths on the bottoms of ships. The inventor was an erratic, drunken genius, with more than a smattering knowledge of chemistry and though Hughes had been sceptical at first, he was at last persuaded that there might be something in it.

       Of course, it was not the first adhesive anti-fouling mixture invented for the purpose; but coming from Cardiff, a city of ships, Hughes knew that a composition capable of doing all it claimed, and of being sold at a moderate price, would be worth money. Anything that would obviate the necessity and expense of cleaning the under-water plating of a vessel in dry dock after a long voyage should represent a fortune. It was not that expense only: the barnacles and enormous growth of weed that will collect on a ship's sheathing, especially in tropical seas, retard speed, and thereby eat into coal, provisions, and wages to an alarming extent. And knowing this, Hughes had been the more ready to listen to what the inventor claimed for his preparation.

       Briefly, Hughes was convinced; the inventor was as usual hard-up, wanted money for a new invention he was enthusiastic about. As a speculation. Hughes bought the secret formula and the rights for a sum of money that represented most of has savings; and thought that fortune was within his grasp.

       It was about that time that he ran up against Detmold, a man he had known on and off for years. Detmold claimed to be in a position to have the invention tested, and if the test proved satisfactory, to find a purchaser; he was on has way to England.

       Finally, the bargain had been struck. Detmold left for England with the formula; he gave no receipt for it — Hughes was amazingly unbusinesslike, and trusted his partner absolutely. It seemed clear now that from the first, Detmold, seeing he had got hold of a good thing, meant to keep that good thing to himself.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays great distress of mind. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. In Cardiff one day Jim is greeted in the street by three ladies, a Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder, and whom he now has sufficient presence of mind to greet as an utter stranger. While conversing with the ladies a mutual acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. The mutual acquaintance subsides, but Ethel Restarrick grew cold and hard. Was she convinced? Meredith takes a house at Penarth, where Owen Hughes meets him and accepts a post in the Rhondda collieries of Meredith's firm. Afterwards Hughes calls upon Elsie Muir, with whom he is in love, and that incident of that calls to the opening of a new new chapter in his life. Hughes declares his love, for Elsie, and is accepted. Leaving the house, he meets Sarrol, whom he suspects of having been in league with Percival Detmold to defraud him (Hughes) in the matter of a ship's paint of which Hughes held the rights, and which he had entrusted to Detmold to put on the market. He challenges Sarrol on the point, and the latter demands proofs.

---

CHAPTER XII. (continued.)
JOHN SARROL WHISPERS.

       "Don't breath a hint to a soul of what we've got up our sleeves," had been the constant tenor of Detmold's injunctions. "We must give no one a hint. Secrecy's everything, in these matters, till we've got it on the market."

       And accordingly Hughes had been as close as a trap.

       From time to time Detmold sent him a line: disappointing letters; the tests were not coming out satisfactorily. Then Hughes returned to England; and Detmold, now established in a house in Llandaff, and showing signs of umwonted prosperity, had professed regretfully that so far he had been able to do nothing with it. And scarcely more than a fortnight ago, in Detmold's own house, accident had thrown in Owen Hughes's way proof that his partner was lying to him, was an unscrupulous rogue.

       It was the chance sight of some words of a letter lying on Detmold's table that had fixed his suspicions in a moment, as a spark explodes gunpowder. Hughes demanded to see the letter, feeling he had the right to see it; end his partner had refused — had made a swift movement to destroy it, his face suddenly turning very pale, and with a guilty confusion written on every line.

       "I am going to see that letter," Hughes had said grimly. "That letter deals with our joint property. If you're an honest man you'll let me see it; if you're not an honest man — well, I am going to see it in spite of you!"

       There was a moment's struggle, but Hughes's grip was like steel on Detmold's wrist. Hughes had read the letter through.

       It was a letter from John Sarrol. Detmold had obtained an introduction to Sarrol through old Evan Meredith, whom Detmold had met at Sevenways in Surrey when staying at his sister's house in the neighbourhood, and this introduction had brought him to Cardiff. Sarrol's letter informed Detmold that the anti-fouling experiments tried on a line of cargo vessels in which he was interested had been successful enough, that he (the writer) was ready to come to terms with Detmold with a view of floating the preparation as a company. Probably at that time Sarrol had no suspicion that Detmold was not alone in the matter.

       These thoughts flashed swiftly through Hughes's mind as he stood facing John Sarrol now on the gravel path at, the side of the Muirs' house.

       There had been a passionate scene between the partners following upon that discovery; Hughes had threatened his partner, and Detmold had brazenly defied him, laughed at him; had said what John Sarrol said now:

       "What proof have you of any interest or rights whatever in it?"

       What proof had he?

       He had not mentioned it to a soul, owing to the injunctions — far from disinterested, as was obvious now — of his partner; he had nothing in writing. He had not even the evidence of the inventor of "the fouling-preventative"; that drunken genius, being slightly more drunk than usual, had one night stepped off the quay into the East River, New York, and that had been the end of his inventions. Hughes had suddenly realised that he had delivered himself bound into the hands of a rogue.

       But he wrote to Sarrol that day, telling him the facts — and quite by chance learned that Detmold after their stormy interview had gone over to see Sarrol. Whether the man had told the truth to the financier, or had point-blank denied his partner's assertions, Hughes had no means of knowing. Certainly from that day to this Sarrol had utterly ignored the letter. And then the day afterwards Detmold had come unexpectedly by his death.

       Did Sarrol know? Had Detmold admitted the truth to him at that last interview? That was the question in Hughes's mind. He felt there was something suspicious about Sarrol's attitude. The latter had not answered his letter, asking for proofs — surely the natural thing to do. What if Detmold had told him that Hughes had no proof, and the financier, who had a reputation of sailing very near the wind and for more than sharp practice in many of the transactions by which he had a fortune, was ignoring this awkward claim, relying on the absence of any proof of it, to avoid making a payment that would cut, perhaps, heavily into his profits?

       "I have no proof, Mr. Sarrol," said Hughes quietly, looking into the smiling, insolent face.

       Sarrol laughed unpleasantly.

       "Exactly; as poor Detmold said the day before his death —–" he began; then stopped abruptly.

       It was a slip. Hughes took him up quickly.

       "So Detmold said I had no proof of an obligation due to me?" he cried hotly. "But he did tell you, then, that I was morally entitled to a half-share, only that in view of the absence of proof you and he could laugh at it with impunity?" he demanded quickly.

       The shot told. For a moment Sarrol seemed taken aback.

       "I didn't say that," he said quickly, evasively.

       "No, but you meant it," cried Hughes, an instinct in him suddenly cutting unerringly through the tissue of words to the truth that he had half suspected before. "And, if so, that means you are wilfully defrauding me, and not unwittingly as I had been ready to believe!" cried Hughes passionately.

       An ugly, dangerous look came into Sarrol's eyes; the purpling veins on his neck stood out.

       "Don't try my patience too far; it has its limits. This impudent claim of yours — you'll get nothing out of me. I don't believe a word of your cock-and-bull story. Mind you don't cool your heels inside a gaol! That's all I have to say to you"

       The raised, angry voices had attracted an audience of one at least, though neither of the two men in their passion saw a gardener standing a little distance off watching the scene with interest.

       "If there was law in the land, that's where you'd be now!" was the passionate retort. "You were in league with Detmold to rob me, to save your pocket my share of the big profits you see your way to making! Everyone knows your reputation for sharp practice; and if you haven't heard it before you shall hear it from me now: everyone in Newport, in Cardiff, knows that John Sarrol isn't above making money by any shady tricks! Tricks that there's only one word for the man who resorts to them — and that is thief! Yes, thief, John Sarrol!"

       "You cur!"

       The big man's face had changed to a curious drab whiteness; he was beside himself with passion. He raised his great fist and aimed a clumsy blow, a blow that missed. No less blindly infuriated, Owen Hughes had clenched his hands; he sprang forward, his hand upraised to strike.

       But the blow did not fall. Unexpectedly the uplifted arm was seized and held from behind. Owen turned to see Stephen Muir.

       "Good Heavens, what does this disgraceful scene mean, Hughes? Are you mad, to attempt to strike a guest of mine?" Muir cried in indignant tones of amazed anger.

       The words, falling on the strain of a poignant situation, brought Hughes suddenly back to himself. Back to an instant sense of bitter regret.

       What a fool to have lost his temper, goaded though he had been; he ought to have kept cool. Fool to have waited at all after Sarrol's arrival, to have allowed Sarrol's taunt to draw him into this fracas that had come to a head in Stephen Muir's presence — to prejudice him still further in the eyes of Elsie's father, already none too well-disposed towards him. What a fool! was his bitter self-reproach. And to-day of all days, when Elsie had, as he had told her, made him the happiest man in Wales.

       And yet all he had said to Sarrol was true. Sarrol had known, had been in the fraud; he could swear Sarrol had known.

       "I am sorry I lost my temper here; but I was goaded to it," Owen said, turning to Stephen Muir, who was foaming and furious — angry with him, not with Sarrol, though Stephen Muir knew nothing of the rights or wrongs of the case, he realised. "It was natural enough I should strike back, after he had struck me."

       The words had no effect on Stephen Muir.

       "I've allowed you to come to this house; and you've taken, advantage of the privilege, presumed on some remote tie of relationship," he said angrily. "Sarrol, I am extremely sorry that this should have happened at my house —–"

       Sarrol was smiling now. The smile did not extend to his eyes; his face was still curiously white, and he was breathing a trifle hard.

       "Don't give it a second thought, Muir. And don't mention this to the ladies. I have something to say to this young man — may I say it in your library? I see the windows are open — since we appear to have an audience here."

       And he glanced round at the gardener, who stood stupidly staring, until Muir walked up to the man angrily.

       Sarrol turned to Owen Hughes. There was an evil glint in the small, close-set eyes. The mouth was like a bar of iron.

       There's just one thing I have to say, that I might have spared you but for this," he said, with a thin note of intense malice cutting like a razor-edge through the deliberate words.

       He took a step nearer to Owen Hughes. Whispered something in his ear.

       Something that, as he heard it, made Owen's face suddenly go white as death; and he recoiled as if from a blow.

[TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays great distress of mind. In answer to Jim's questions, she makes an incoherent statement, and begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. After the constable departs Jim's companion declares she did not do the deed, but was frightened at the horror of it. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith drives back to the place of the murder, and there finds that the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Fearful lest the girl he has befriended left some clue in her flight, Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. In Cardiff one day Jim is greeted in the street by three ladies, a Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder, and whom he now has sufficient presence of mind to greet as an utter stranger. While conversing with the ladies a mutual acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. The mutual acquaintance subsides, but Ethel Restarrick grew cold and hard. Was she convinced? Meredith takes a house at Penarth, where Owen Hughes meets him and accepts a post in the Rhondda collieries of Meredith's firm. Afterwards Hughes calls upon Elsie Muir, with whom he is in love, and that incident of that calls to the opening of a new new chapter in his life. Hughes declares his love, for Elsie, and is accepted. Leaving the house, he meets Sarrol, whom he suspects of having been in league with Percival Detmold to defraud him (Hughes) in the matter of a ship's paint of which Hughes held the rights, and which he had entrusted to Detmold to put on the market. He challenges Sarrol on the point, and the latter demands proofs. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow.

---

       "When the Great Judge is pronouncing sentence, of what avail will it be then to cry: 'The Woman Tempted Me'?"

CHAPTER XIII.
THE TRUTH.

       Triumph and cynical amusement mingled in John Sarrol's face as he looked at the man whom these whispered words of his had suddenly struck aghast and for a moment dumb.

       Then Hughes cried vehemently:

       "No — it's not true! I tell you, it's not true."

       "We'll finish our talk in the library. We won't be five minutes, Muir," added Sarrol blandly.

       Stephen Muir, ruffled and frowning, watched his guest, followed by Owen Hughes, walk along the verandah to the French window near that stood open, the window of the library. The drawing-room was on the other side of the house.

       The two men passed through the long window into the empty room. Since Sarrol's whispering of that brief, pregnant sentence into Owen's ear and the latter's vehement denial as of some accusation no word had been exchanged between them.

       Outside in the garden it was still light, but in the room, darkened by the roof of the verandah, the shadows were beginning to start in the corners. Sarrol switched on the electric light; then turned to confront the younger man, his mouth hard, his eyes like points of steel.

       "You called me a thief," he said. "But you — I told you just now what you are." And there was a gleam of cruel amusement in his face as he looked at the younger man.

       "It's monstrous — untrue," said Hughes, in a low, strangled voice, speaking with difficulty. "I tell You, it's a lie."

       Oh, no; it's true enough. Most of that virtuous indignation of yours seems to have left you, eh? You would have been more virtuously indignant still if you had nothing to fear. I suspected it all along; now I know it. Denials won't serve you. I tell you I know it," cried Sarrol in his masterful, bullying way. "You murdered Percival Detmold!"

       Owen Hughes made a desperate, protesting gesture with his hands and his lips moved, but no sound came from them to break the momentary tense silence that hung in the room. Somehow to Hughes the room seemed full of whisperings, echoes rising from every corner, flinging back upon him from all sides that hideous accusation:

       "You murdered Percival Detmold."

       Hughes's hands were clenched as if to get a grip on his shaken nerves, on his voice. His lips were parched and dry. Those words whispered in his ears, that accusation repeated now, had dropped like a bolt out of a clear sky. He glanced desperately at the mocking face.

       "I swear I did not murder the man," he whispered.

       Sarrol laughed his scorn.

       "Come, come, is it worth while?" he said with a sneer. "If you had nothing to fear, would you take it like this?"

       "I may have something to fear — and yet be innocent of murder," said Hughes doggedly. "A man may be innocent and yet not able to clear himself."

       His voice was eager, excited; there was horror in his face. He realised that he was at this man's mercy. He knew how difficult it would be for him to clear himself. Fear had suddenly gripped him — the fear that seems to stop a man's heart in its beat, turning it to a handful of dust.

       "No, I rather think you would have difficulty in clearing yourself. It would be an awkward task for you to explain why, if innocent, you didn't come forward and tell the police that you were at Detmold's house at the time he met his death."

       With an effort Hughes pulled himself together, steadied his voice.

       "If, as you say, you suspected me all along, why did you not tell the police? You have no means of knowing where I was that night."

       John Sarrol shrugged his shoulders. But for an instant he made no answer.

       Hughes's accusation of earlier had struck home. He had known that Detmold was defrauding this man — but not until the explanation that he had demanded and obtained from Detmold after receiving Hughes's letter, the day before Detmold's death.

       Taxed by Sarrol, Detmold had brazenly admitted the facts. Perhaps he was a shrewd enough judge of character, knew Sarrol well enough, to think that the truth was the best policy.

       "I am letting you have this anti-fouling formula cheap," he said in effect. "Admit Hughes's claim, and he'll stand out for his whack. He always meant to. He can't prove anything; couldn't take the case to court — he hasn't a leg to stand on. Why bother about the young fool?"

       Sarrol had not come to any decision when he and Detmold parted that day — or, if he had, he had not communicated that decision to the tempter; but, when the next day Detmold met a tragic fate, Detmold whom he had already paid the agreed purchase-money, he had come to a sudden, swift decision. Hughes, if his claim were admitted, would stand out for "a big whack"; if his claim were admitted at all, Hughes would under the circumstances be able to dictate terms.

       "Why should I pay twice over?" John Sarrol had argued to himself. "I took this thing over from Detmold in good faith. Be —— to Owen Hughes!"

       And he knew, he alone, that Hughes had been at Detmold's house at the time of the latter's death. Well, by keeping silence, he was virtually making a payment to Hughes worth infinitely more than the money, he had argued, throwing this as a sop to his remnants of a conscience.

       Besides, if he gave information to the police, the cause of the quarrel between Hughes and the dead man would come out inevitably — that and his share in the transaction; and that would damage him. Hughes bad no proof of his claim; but plenty of people would believe in that claim. It would damage him. And so Sarrol held his tongue.

       "I know you were at Detmold's house; I'll tell you how I know. Detmold had a telephone, and soon after you arrived at his place he left you to ring me up. He happened to tell me you had come and seemed bent on kicking up a row. Pretty conclusive proof, I think. He rang off and went back to you; and I suppose recriminations were resumed. Anyhow, the medical evidence fixed tho time of the man's death shortly after he rang me up on the telephone! Oh, I think that when I tell my story to the police you'll find the meshes of evidence pretty tight!"

       There was the look as of a hunted animal cornered in Owen's eyes.

       He saw the trap closing on him; the ground mined under his feet. Then he cried desperately:

       "You shall hear the truth. And the truth's this: Detmold died by his own hand!"

---

CHAPTER XIV.
THE CLOSING TRAP.

       The agony of appeal in the man's voice, this appeal to be believed, left Sarrol unmoved.

       "Come, that's rather a tall story, isn't it?" he said.

       "It's true. You shall listen — you have no right to judge me till you've heard," cried Owen. "I went to Detmold's house that night. It was the day after I'd discovered his treachery; I was determined to force him to acknowledge my claim. And he laughed at me, defied me. I could not have believed any man to be so base . . . . and then I lost my head."

       The words came from his lips jerkily, rapidly. John Sarrol stood looking at him in the radiance of the electric light, an incredulous smile playing about the heavy, cruel face. The man's misery left him untouched.

       Then I think he was frightened. He suddenly produced the revolver — it was proved to be his at the inquest — and threatened me with it. I was reckless; went for him to wrest the weapon from him. In the struggle that ensued the revolver went off inadvertently, his finger pulling the trigger — his finger not mine, his act not mine, as God is my judge!"

       He paused; the beads of perspiration were standing out on his brow; there was horror on his face as he re-called that scene that had unexpectedly ended in tragedy.

       Breaking in upon the poignant pause, a girl's light, rippling laugh came faintly to them from somewhere in the house beyond the closed door — Elsie's laugh.

       There was the nearing murmur of women's voices, that grew louder, and suddenly died away, as the ladies came down to the drawing-room from the upstairs room where Mrs. Sarrol had been removing her motoring coat and hat. Elsie's happy laugh, bringing a sudden vision to the tortured man, on whom fate's trap was closing, of a girl's face with shining eyes looking into his under the shadow of wind-stirred leaves; and a spasm of pain crossed his face. That had been less than an hour ago, and now —–

       Dully his voice went on with his confession.

       "How it was that the shot, accidentally discharged as we struggled, struck him, I don't know; I only know that that's the truth — that morally I am guiltless, that morally I cannot blame myself one iota for his death. God knows in all my passionate anger I never dreamed or wished such a thing as that! But as I stood in the room, with the echoes of the report sounding so deafeningly in my ears through the empty house, so loud that it seemed to me as though all the world must hear, looking down in the lamplight at a huddled figure that had slipped to the floor simultaneously with my relaxed grip, is it to be wondered at that overwhelming horror and fear fell on me? It was as though fear had suddenly came into the room like a tangible presence.

       "I stood listening for a moment, powerless to move, realising that to be found here alone with the dead man might mean a charge of murder, might mean that my story would not be believed . . . . He had died instantly; I saw that. I could do nothing for him — and I had myself to think of. I stood listening; for minutes it must have been; no one came. Then I plucked up courage; the vital thing was to get away unseen. Out of the room, through the French windows, not pausing even to extinguish the light in my panic; through the garden into the road. No one was about to see me leave. Then I ran."

       A couple of miles away, trembling and unnerved, Owen Hughes had called at a public-house; had stayed there in the corner of the bar trying to drown his horror and fear. Then when finally he came out, someone drove up to the inn from the direction he had come, full of the news. The discovery of the tragedy must have been made within ten minutes of this flight; and panic crept in upon him again.

       Why he had gone back in the direction of the house he could not have said in his dazed state, unless it were from some vague idea of hearing if any suspicion were aroused. It was then he had met Jim Meredith motoring away from the house.

       He turned suddenly to Sarrol.

       "Do you believe me now?"

       The answer came back in tomes as hard as granite.

       "All I know is that you were in that house when Detmold met his death. It's for a jury to decide whether you are guilty or not."

       He paused; then:

       "You called me a thief," he said with an intense malice. "No man has ever called John Sarrol that before — no man has ever done me an injury that I haven't tried to repay with compound interest. I like to see my enemies suffer; I like to bend and break a stubborn will. Do you know what I am going to do?"

       Owen Hughes's desperate eyes rolled round the room. He saw it was useless to appeal to this man, with the spice of relentless cruelty about the hard mouth; his own pride came to his aid; he would not beg for mercy from this man. At least, he had spoken the truth; at least, he was morally guiltless. Only would a jury believe that?

       "A thief, eh?" repeated Sarrol.

       He suddenly sat down at a writing-table in the room; took up a sheet of note-paper and wrote some lines on it hurriedly in the big, sprawling, characteristic hand. He addressed an envelope, smiling, as a tiger-like streak in him played round an idea that had come into his mind.

       "You fool, to make an enemy of a man like me!" he said, rising and crossing over to the other man. "Read that."

       He thrust the letter and envelope into Owen's hands.

       "Because you called me a thief, I'm going to send that letter to-night."

       Mechanically, Hughes, took them; stood staring at that missive, that would be a messenger of fate for him, with the dull, desperate eyes of a man who sees his last chance irrevocably forfeit.

[TO BE CONTITfTJED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays great distress of mind. She begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith finds the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. In Cardiff one day Jim meets Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder. An acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. Owen Hughes proposes to Elsie Muir, and is accepted. Leaving the house, he meets Sarrol, whom he suspects of having been in league with Percival Detmold to defraud him (Hughes) in the matter of a ship's paint of which Hughes held the rights, and which he had entrusted to Detmold to put on the market. He challenges Sarrol on the point, and the latter demands proofs. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow. Hughes and Sarrol adjourn to the library, where the whisper, which is an accusation that Hughes murdered Percival Detmold, is repeated. Hughes denies this, and declares Detmold threatened him with a revolver, which, in the struggle with Hughes, went off inadvertently and killed Detmold. Sarrol flouts this, and shows Hughes a letter he is going to send denouncing him.

---

CHAPTER XIV. (continued.)
THE CLOSING TRAP.

       An hour ago a girl had told him that she loved him; he had told himself that this thing of which he held himself guiltless, though he knew how hard a task it might be to prove it, could never rise to menace him now. He had been, so sure of that — so sure; else he would never have asked Elsie Muir to share his future.

       Now fate's iron grip was on him, and that dream of an hour ago broken, ended — such a brief dream!

       The letter and the envelope fluttered to the floor. On the envelope the words of the address stared up at him — the name of the local superintendent of police.

       Somehow, in a dim, inconsequent way, that upturned envelope reminded him of that upturned head of the coin lying in the road — the coin he had spun before coming to the house to-night. And because it had been "heads" he had entered the gates, when "tails" would have saved him.

       And this was the letter Sarrol had written and signed:

       "I can furnish proof that Owen Hughes, of Cardiff" — and the writer gave the address — "went to Mr. Detmold's house shortly before the murder, and that a fierce quarrel took place between the two men, and that Hughes threatened Detmold. Unless you arrest the man at once he will probably bolt.

       Then Hughes turned desperately to Sarrol. To have to sue for mercy to a man he knew now had deliberately made up his mind to defraud him! But a man situated as he was had to humble his pride.

       "Are you bent on sending this letter? What good will it do you? And you have kept silence for two weeks. You will be asked why you were so long in telling what you knew."

       "Possibly," Sarrol assented blandly. "But you see I have been ill, as my doctor will state. A man who is ill might easily forget the telephone message, or fail to draw a logical conclusion from it for a little time. Oh, there will be no difficulty in giving an explanation."

       "It will injure the prospects of the company you are floating. For my defence will be that I lost my temper, because I found I was being defrauded in the transaction between you and Detmold —–"

       "I am a rich man. I can afford to pay for the pleasure of reprisals on the man who called me a thief."

       "Then you really do mean to send that letter, and ruin me?" whispered Hughes.

       Sarrol chuckled, as though an idea had suddenly come to him — an idea that appealed to that tiger-like streak in his nature.

       "I'll tell you what I'll do. Come back here to the library at half-past, nine to-night. I'll give you my decision then."

       There was suspicion in Hughes's eyes.

       What trap was his enemy laying for him?

---

CHAPTER XV.
"THE SHADOW OF SOMETHING COMING."

       "Come back at half-past nine to the library here, and I'll tell you my decision," John Sarrol repeated.

       As he had said in the course of that interview, he liked to see his enemies suffer. Whilst he was dining comfortably — and he glanced at the clock; it was nearly eight o'clock, the dinner hour — he would keep Owen Hughes on the thorns of suspense. The idea struck him as rather humorous. Why should he spare this man, who had called him a thief? he asked himself, with a vindictive gleam in his eyes. And what should he do finally? He hardly knew yet.

       "Is this some trap?" demanded Hughes suddenly.

       "I shall not send this letter till I have seen you again here in Mr. Muir's library at half-past nine — though, perhaps, it is a liberty for me to make appointments in other pecple's houses — if that is what you mean. And that's all I have to say now. Come or not, as you like, of course."

       Owen Hughes stood staring at him dully for a moment as if dazed, then suddenly turned and walked to the French window, his eyes weary and hopeless, yet holding himself erect, pulling himself together with a sudden pride. He would not show himself a coward, in this hour of his fate, before John Sarrol.

       Just for a moment the thought of immediate flight crossed his mind, but he dismissed the idea at once. Would flight avail him? There was a bare chance that, after playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, Sarrol might spare him. But if, he did not come back at half-past nine Sarrol would almost beyond question inform the police. And flight might seem, even to Elsie when the story was told, like guilt.

       Almost before Owen Hughes passed over the threshold of the long window, the door opened, and Mrs. Sarrol appeared.

       "I came to find you, John," she said. "Mr. Muir said you were busy for a few minutes; but you were so long that I came to remind you that it is nearly eight o'clock. And, John — why is Mr. Hughes to come here at half-past nine?" she asked rather hesitatingly. "I heard your words as I was about to open the door. You haven't been quarrelling with him, have you?" with an apprehensive look at the bulky figure of her husband, still in the big motor coat that covered his evening clothes.

       He did not answer; he was so busy with a thought in his mind; he hardly heard the words. Mrs. Sarrol's eyes saw the letter and envelope still lying on the carpet where they had dropped from Owen's hand, and moving forward, she read the address on the envelope — the name of the police superintendent. The letter had fallen face downwards. A little, startled cry broke from her.

       "John, have you been quarrelling with Mr. Hughes? I thought your voice —" she was beginning, as she stooped quickly to pick up the letter.

       But John Sarrol was quicker still. He bent forward and snatched the letter up almost as her hand was touching it.

       "When will you learn to mind your own business?" he said, in a very quiet, very intense voice, and he swore at her; and Mrs. Sarrol shrank back before the ugly word with a sudden look of fear on the wax-doll prettiness of her face, without a further word.

       There were stories current among the acquaintances of the Sarrols that it was not a happy marriage. Anyone who had witnessed that little domestic scene would have known that for once Rumour was not without foundation.

       He thrust the letter into the envelope, and followed his wife to the drawing-room — a big, florid room, where the furniture seemed too new and too highly polished; and with too many tropical buds and sprawling tendrils in the thick Axminster carpet, and in the overwhelmingly gorgeous wall-paper, stamped in gold relief.

       He went up to Mrs. Muir with an apology.

       "I hope I have not kept dinner. As I told your husband, I wanted a few minutes with Hughes in the library; I did not expect my wife to be downstairs so soon. It is not often she can drag herself away readily from a looking-glass," he said, glancing at his wife with a laugh, as he delivered this heavy pleasantry at her expense.

       As most of the Sarrols' acquaintances knew, it was an amiable habit of his to indulge in witticisms of this order that left much to be deseired in the way of good taste, little pin-pricks that must have been galling to the pride of a sensitive woman.

       "It's just Sarrol's way, his bluff, blunt honest way," an apologist bad once said, but then the apologist was a man who had his own good reasons for wishing to keep in Sarrol's good books, and made a business of scattering many flattering expressions of his esteem for Sarrol, no doubt in the hope that some of them might be repeated to the rich man.

       Mrs. Sarrol smiled nervously; Elsie, who found Sarrol at his best difficult to endure, looked at him quite unsmilingly, as he turned to address a remark to her. Her brother Philip's face went dark, and he crossed the room abruptly. Philip felt he could have struck the man. That Beatrice should have linked herself to this hectoring bully!

(TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.)

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Jim Meredith returns to Cardiff from India to inherit the vast wealth of his uncle, who has left him everything beyond £1,000. The latter is bequeathed to Olive Lindsay, the old man's adopted daughter, who was brought up as his heiress, but was out of his will because she was accused and convicted of stealing. Since her imprisonment Olive Lindsay had dropped out of sight. Jim, one evening, motoring beyond Cardiff in the direction of Radyr, hears a shot, and presently there pushes out into the road just ahead of his car a woman, who betrays great distress of mind. She begs him to help her fly the spot. On their way a mounted policeman stops them, and states that a man has been shot by a woman who has run away. Having left the girl, at her own request, near Radyr Station, after assuring her he believed she had not done the thing named by the policeman, Jim Meredith finds the victim is a man named Percival Detmold. Jim searches the grounds surrounding Detmold's house, and on a rose bush finds a brown veil, which he seizes and secretes. Later, Jim finds Detmold was one of the witnesses in the Black Pearl case against Olive Lindsay. In Cardiff one day Jim meets Mrs. Jardine, an old friend, Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, and formerly Jim's sweetheart, and another introduced to him as Miss Kennedy, whom he recognised, with a start, as being the girl he befriended on the night of the murder. An acquaintance greets the group, and proceeds to banter Meredith for having, as he alleges, cut him on the night of the murder, adding that he saw him (Meredith) driving Miss Kennedy to Radyr Station. Meredith admits driving a lady to the station, but declares that it was not Miss Kennedy, whom (he added) he had just met for the first time. Owen Hughes proposes to Elsie Muir, and is accepted. Leaving the house, he meets Sarrol, whom he suspects of having been in league with Percival Detmold to defraud him (Hughes) in the matter of a ship's paint of which Hughes held the rights, and which he had entrusted to Detmold to put on the market. He challenges Sarrol on the point, and the latter demands proofs. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow. Hughes and Sarrol adjourn to the library, where the whisper, which is an accusation that Hughes murdered Percival Detmold, is repeated. Hughes denies this, and declares Detmold threatened him with a revolver, which, in the struggle with Hughes, went off inadvertently and killed Detmold. Sarrol flouts this, and shows Hughes a letter he is going to send denouncing him. Then tells him to come back at nine o'clock, when he (Sarrol) will tell him what he intends to do.

---

CHAPTER XV. (continued).
"THE SHADOW OF SOMETHING COMING."

       For long before Beatrice Lloyd had married Mr. Sarrol, of Newport, there had been something like a love affair between her and Stephen Muir's second son.

       He was a good-looking man, this second son of the Muirs, who had shown such few signs of following in the footsteps of his eider brother Alfred, the precise, plodding son of his father, who had struck Meredith as being more of a machine than human. The two brothers as unlike in feature as they were in habit. Philip and Elsie had monopolised all the good looks in the family; and Stephen Muir was secretly uncommonly proud of his handsome, dashing son, even whilst he deplored his apparent inability to settle down to anything. Probably if Philip had not been a Muir, to bias parental prejudices, Stephen would have dubbed him a rolling-stone, and might have done so with strict truth.

       Elsie wondered, as the move was made into the dining-room, what business her lover could have had with Mr. Sarrol. That it had been anything but an ordinary business chat she had no suspicion; Stephen Muir, though annoyed and fuming, angry with Owen whom he held responsible for the outburst he had witnessed without in the least understanding, had taken Sarrol's hint, and had not spoken of it to his wife or daughter. Time enough to tell them when his guests had gone.

       Somehow, dinner was not altogether a success to-night; a vague constraint seemed to affect the party of seven sitting at the table: a constraint, perhaps, communicated telepathically by Sarrol — who sat, unusually preoccupied, contributing little to the talk, and having his glass filled rather frequently — and by Mrs. Sarrol, who seemed nervous and constrained, stealing occasional nervous glances at her husband.

       An undefinable sense of vague, impending trouble oppressed her. She could hardly have told why, but she had been a bundle of nerves all day. Something she read in her husband's face, in his manner, added to her unaccountable nervousness. She had caught his parting words to Owen Hughes — there was nothing in the words themselves; but the tones of the voice had struck her. Her married life had taught Beatrice Sarrol to read in her husband's voice subtle meanings that were very different sometimes from the actual, uttered words; she had felt to-night as though something had been moving secretly behind those words, something ominous; that envelope addressed to the superintendent of police had strengthened the impression.

       Once as she cast a furtive glance at him, she saw his lips form a word. It was the word "Thief." And there was a cruel gleam in the heavy, flushed face that she had learned to know and fear.

       John Sarrol was wondering what course he should take when half-past nine brought Owen Hughes to him — the man who had called him a thief.

       Once when he spoke to Beatrice, it was in a curt, domineering voice that made Philip Muir's hands clench under the table. Throughout dinner, Philip had talked almost exclusively to her, ignoring her husband in a manner almost pointed.

       Perhaps he had never really been very deeply in love with Beatrice Lloyd — not so genuinely, at any rate, as he now fancied himself to have been; but — it was characteristic of the weak, self-indulgent nature of a man like Philip Muir, who had been spoilt as a child by his mother, and later by many women caught by the attraction of his handsome face — now that she was no longer free, he liked to tell himself that she was the only woman he had ever thought seriously about, who had made a difference in his life — the forbidden fruit that is always the sweetest — until he had almost come to believe in his own pose.

       And to-night the pose was getting out of hand in some extraordinary way, away from his control. He had seen little of her since her marriage; he had been away from Penarth at the time of it. The sight of the fragile prettiness that had always appealed to him — that and the occasional shrinking look she stole at her husband, that told its own tale, had mounted to his head. How he hated the overfed brute opposite to him, with the traces of his excesses already showing in his face — how he hated the man!

       Under the circumstances conversation, languished.

       Elsie, who usually kept the ball rolling in her animated way, was busy with her thoughts — happy thoughts about her lover that were like the lilt of a song in her heart. It was so wonderful: she must have cared all along, but until his impetuous words she had not realised that she cared in that way of love; it was as though at the touch of passion as by fire the veil had been stripped from her eyes in a moment. She must always have cared for him!

       There was a tender smile, about her mouth as she looked down at the spray of syringa at her breast that Owen had pinned there. She knew there would be difficulties to face — obstacles; but she always had her own way in the end with the father who doted on her. And she would have her way in this. And even if they were comparatively poor, she and Owen, until he had made his way, what did that matter? Youth and love can contemplate poverty so serenely.

       Then the voice of John Sarrol broke in upon her pleasant thoughts — a reference to Detmold's death.

       Elsie's face frowned a little. She did not want to think of tragic things — she wanted to think only of her new, wonderful happiness. Sarrol was chuckling, as if at some secret joke; his heavy face rose red and flushed over the vast, bulging expanse of shirt front.

       Mention of Detmold led to the topic of his sister, Mrs. Angeray, and her stolen pearls.

       "Ever see that girl, Olive Lindsay, old Meredith's protegee, who took 'em," asked Sarrol. "I suppose you have, Muir?"

       "No; she never came to Cardiff, I think," replied Stephen Muir. "That escapade of hers was a lucky thing for young Meredith, eh?"

       "Poor girl!" said Mrs. Sarrol suddenly, with a touch of feeling. "What a sad affair it was —–"

       Her husband broke in rudely:

       "Oh, 'poor girl,' be hanged! Hope they gave her skilly and spoilt her pretty hands scrubbing her cell floor," he said, with his unpleasant laugh. "She was pretty, I've heard — and all women are jealous of other pretty women, and I expect if you'd only confess it, for all your charming pose of pity, my dear, you hope so, too!"

       For a moment there was a dead silence. It seemed to strike even Sarrol that he had gone a shade too far; at the intolerable rudeness. Mrs. Sarrol's face flushed and then went white. Philip suddenly turned his eyes from her face to Sarrol's, and said:

       "I know you are an authority on company promoting. I wonder if you are an authority on women, Mr. Sarrol?"

       He could not keep the words back. But a swift after-impulse caused him to try to tone down this deliberate brusquerie to his father's guest by a would-be genial laugh.

       One had only to look at his eyes to realise how forced the laugh was.

       Another moment's awkward pause followed. Mrs. Sarrol glanced nervously at her husband, half afraid of what might follow this act of championship. Sarrol stared at Philip for an instant; then unexpectedly laughed — perhaps, he felt that the weight of sympathy was against him. A laugh in which Mrs. Muir with a sense of relief joined. She had been watching her son anxiously.

       Alfred threw himself into the breach to create a diversion.

       "Hullo, was that a flash of summer lightning outside? Hope we aren't going to have a storm."

       "Hope not, for my wife's sake — and our drive back to Newport to-night. You'd be a bit nervy, eh, Bee?" he said, speaking with an effort at amiability.

       One had only to look at the pink and white doll-like face to feel that Beatrice Sarrol was a bundle of nerves. And yet there had been at times a look in her face, in her eyes, since her marriage that seemed to hint that perhaps in this dainty, delicate doll of a woman there were deeper latent potentialities waiting to be brought out at the touch of life and fate.

       "Anyhow, the car's broken in," added Sarrol with heavy humour — "she won't shy now at a peal of thunder."

       It appeared likely, however, that there would be no storm — that, indeed, Alfred had invented the lightning in his desire to change the subject; as Philip and Beatrice Sarrol realised when at last dinner was over, and they wandered out together on to the verandah into the pleasant cool of the summer night.

       There was no moon; only a handful of stars piercing the dark spaces of the sky. The soft night air was full of the scent of flowers. The peaceful garden lay half-revealed, half-imagined in the deepening dusk, as the man and the woman walked slowly along the verandah. Sarrol, Stephen Muir, and Alfred had betaken themselves to the billiard-room to smoke and talk "shop" before Philip and Beatrice had left the ladies in the drawing-room.

       The side of the great house, where the French window of the library was, lay in deep shadow, pierced by no lights from any window. The library was in darkness, that room where at half-past nine Owen Hughes was to hear his fate.

       Beyond the frame of woodwork of the open long window in the room lay a wall of grey darkness and gloom. Walking along the verandah, Philip and Mrs. Sarrol had turned the corner of the house to this more desolate side, and their footsteps brought them to the library window.

       The woman suddenly gave a little, uncontrollable shiver.

       "I am afraid you are cold?" Philip cried anxiously. Her face looked pale.

       "No." She gave a little laugh that sounded forced. "I was thinking how dark and uncanny it looks in there, in that room — dark and sinister and silent, almost like a grave! Philip — I suppose I oughtn't to call you Philip? — odd fancies come to us women sometimes, and — don't laugh at me —–"

       "I won't laugh."

       "Perhaps I've been fanciful all day — and it's my unlucky day to-day: that may have something to do with feeling as I do," she said; "queer, superstitious fancies that come to one sometimes, one doesn't know why or of what — have you ever felt like that, Philip, as somehow I feel to-night? — apparently without any cause, just as though some impending evil was casting its shadow before and unconsciously one's mind was oppressed by the shadow of that something coming —–"

       She broke off abruptly, as if half ashamed of the sudden impulse of her mood that had prompted the odd words, her eyes resting with a curious intentness on the dimly outlined window and the recesses of deep gloom beyond that it framed: dark, silent, sinister, as she had said of it — like a grave.

[TO BE CONTINUED ON MONDAY.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

The principal characters in the story are Jim Meredith, heir to his uncle, who has cut out of his will his adopted daughter, Olive Lindsay, because she was convicted of stealing pearls; Percival Detmold, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, who is found in his house at Llandaff shot through the heart, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering; Eva Kennedy, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, an, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station; Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart, and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident and suspects; Owen Hughes, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets John Sarrol, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow. Hughes and Sarrol adjourn to the library, where the whisper, which is an accusation that Hughes murdered Percival Detmold, is repeated. Hughes denies this, and declares Detmold threatened him with a revolver, which, in the struggle with Hughes, went off inadvertently and killed Detmold. Sarrol flouts this, and shows Hughes a letter he is going to send denouncing him. Then tells him to come back at nine o'clock, when he (Sarrol) will tell him what he intends to do. "The shadow of something coming" broods over more than one member of the Muir dinner party that night, and later Beatrice Sarrol and Philip Muir, who were formerly in love with each other, saunter through the grounds, in earnest conversation.

---

CHAPTER XVI.
THE MAN AND THE WOMAN.

       "What do you mean, Beatrice — the shadow of something coming?"

       Philip Muir repeated the words that had broken from her almost involuntarily in the strangely overwrought, nervous mood that seemed to possess Beatrice Sarrol to-night.

       He saw how pale her face was, her eyes feverishly bright, touched with those vague, haunting presentiments and fears that she had been half ashamed to confess to, saw that she was a bundle of nerves. Once, as they had turned and were walking along the verandah towards the lighted side of the house, he noticed that the woman glanced back over her shoulder at the long, open window of the room behind them, as though she could not shake off that sudden, strange, uncanny sensation that the void of darkness which the grey panel framed had unaccountably stirred in her. He watched her face with an anxious sympathy.

       "What do you mean, Beatrice?" he said again gently.

       Beatrice Sarrol forced a laugh.

       "Oh, perhaps. I hardly know myself. You'll think I'm a neurotic person, to get such stupid fancies into my head — only I can't help them; one of one's bad days when odd, oppressive fancies come, like black butterflies, between one's mind and the sunlight! Only I'm ashamed that I inflicted them on you."

       "You said to-day was your unlucky day? What do you mean by that?"

       "Did I?" She paused, staring out over the shadowy garden that lay asleep in the soft summer dusk. "Oh, you mustn't ask for a reason for every foolish thing a woman says!" she added.

       He looked at her closely; the forced simile left the trouble in her eyes untouched. A sudden, dangerous wave of emotion had swept over Philip to-night. He had only seen Beatrice Sarrol once or twice since her marriage; this was the first occasion, since those days when he had seen much of her, that he had found himself alone with her — and at a time when all his sense of chivalry had been stirred on her behalf, mingling perilously with a rush at the old feelings that, whether genuine or not then, seemed absolutely real to him now.

       All through dinner he had been keeping his smouldering resentment under by an effort — his anger against Beatrice's husband, who could speak to his wife aa John Sarrol had spoken not once or twice only to her. He had not failed to see her furtive glances at the man from time to time, that heaped fuel on the flame of his feelings. She was so frail and delicate a creature, who ought only to know tenderness and care, with the fragile prettiness that bad always had its power over him, to be at the mercy of this great, bullying brute, who could put a deliberate, humiliating slight on her before her friends. How he hated John Sarrol!

       "Let us go back now, Philip; your mother will think it strange our running away from the drawing-room like this."

       "Why should she? It's cooler and pleasanter out here on the verandah — and it's the first time I've seen you alone since your marriage. And we have so much to say to each other, Beatrice —–"

       "But my husband —–" she began, and there was a trace of nervousness is her tones.

       "Oh, he's in the billiard-room, deep in business talk with my father and Alfred. He's a fixture there." Philip found it difflcult to speak of John Sarrol without the anger surging up in his voice.

       "But if be were to come back, he — Philip, I — I don't think he likes you. He — from his hints I think he knows that we used to be great friends. And when he is in a jealous mood —–" She broke off abruptly.

       "What do you mean, Beatrice?" he demanded quickly, watching her face.

       "Oh, don't let us talk about myself," she said; and he saw her lip quiver.

       They walked slowly along the verandah in silence towards the French windows of the drawing-room; the fitful summer breeze stirred the frilled edges of the curtains. In the room Elsie was at the piano, playing softly; Mrs. Muir had fallen into a light after-dinner doze, from which she started as the two figures passed into the radius of light that fell out across the verandah. The men were still in the billiard-room.

       "No, we aren't coming in yet," said Philip. "It's so pleasantly cool out here, and I'm going to smoke a cigarette on the verandah. I know you don't like smoking in this holy of holies of yours!"

       He took a cigarette from his case as he spoke; he and Beatrice walked slowly back along the verandah. At the corner of the house she paused, leaning thoughtfully against the balustrade.

       "Why, you haven't even lighted your cigarette," she said lightly. "I thought you were so anxious to smoke."

       "I wanted to keep you out here," he said.

       A young moon was rising, making a tangle of fretted silver and shadow in this Penarth garden within sound of the sea, quiet with the brooding stillness as of a cathedral close; a moon that seemed to plunge in deeper shadow by contrast this unlighted side of the house, at a corner of which they were standing, except that its beams just caught the smooth fairness of one white arm resting against the balustrade; in the dim starlight her face was pale and wistful. From somewhere in the house came the click of billiard balls, and then a loud, noisy voice, "That's my game!" that mingled with the chiming of a clock. A quarter past nine. Quarter of an hour to the time when Owen Hughes was to come to see John Sarrol again.

       Sarrol's voice sounded curiously near; it had the effect of coming to them through the open window of the library a few yards from where they stood. Philip saw the woman start and wince at the unexpected sound of the rough voice, and a look of fear was in her eyes again.

       He put his hand over hers as it rested on the verandah rail, and a sudden thrill crept like quickening fire through his veins at the touch. A madness seemed to be mounting to his head; the sense of nearness, her hair with its faint, elusive perfume almost touching his face, the dangerous stirring up of old passions, and his hatred of the man who he told himself had supplanted him; all mounted to his head like wine.

       [... missing line here ...] not quite steady, "I could have struck him to-night. I felt I could have killed him, because having won you, you whom I would have given worlds to win, he has not made you happy; does not even try to make you happy!"

       "Don't let us speak of myself, don't pity me," she whispered, and her lips were tremulous, "or I shall let myself get out of hand, and I don't want to do that. I want to be loyal to my husband; one's self-respect and the mere relationship of marriage demand one should be loyal."

       "Yes, he's your husband," Philip said bitterly. "Bee," he broke out suddenly, "why did you do it? Why did you marry this man who doesn't even try to make you happy? You had no right. What were his claims to mine? You had no right, I say!"

       "Philip!" There was a sudden touch of pride in her voice, in her face, as she turned to him quickly. "You have no right to say that. It's like an accusation — an accusation you have no right to make."

       "But I do say it. Oh, if he were an average decent man, good to you, making your married life happy, I'd not raise my voice against him by a word; I'd fight down my own disappointment; I'm man enough for that. Only to-night his sneers, your unhappiness, your evident fear of him — all show what the man is!" he cried passionately. "Beatrice, why were you in such haste to spoil your life and mine?"

       She drew a deep, shivering breath, as though the summer night had suddenly gone chill. Her tones were almost cold, ice to his fire, as she answered him: yet, perhaps, beneath the ice lay what repressed flame?

       "It is not fair to say that I spoiled your life. You are not fair or just to say it."

       "Not fair? I was out of England; and when I left you were free; before I returned you had accepted this man, married him. Yet you knew I cared for you, Beatrice — you must have known," he cried.

       The words spoke themselves. An unfettered surge of emotion had engulfed him. A man can deceive 'himself sometimes by his own pose; but the woman's scorn cut with rapier keenness through the self-pity in his voice — a depth of feeling in the scorn of her words and tone that a stranger would never have associated with the wax-doll prettiness of her face.

       "Oh, it isn't fair to say that now. You never told me you cared when I was free. Why do you say it now when it's too late? You never spoke then — not in words at least; how was I to know? You say you cared? But you went away from England without a word. . . . and yet you say you had a claim! You had no claim; you have no right to reproach me!"

       "I couldn't speak then," he said, half sullenly, for the moment at least believing his words. "I wasn't in a position to speak, to ask you to marry me. I was poor, hoping for a time to come when I should be able to tell you. But I always loved you, Bee. You must have known that! And you — Bee, you cared for me! You can't deny it — you cared for use, too!"

       For a moment her lips moved as though they would frame a denial — the denial born of pride, of loyalty to a man she hated; a denial to which her eyes would have given the lie. But the words did not come.

       "Oh, if only you had spoken!" she cried. "If only you bad told me before you left England. . . . a woman is so helpless. Do you think if a woman cared she — she would not have waited? Philip, Philip, if you only knew how I waited and hoped that you would speak! If you only knew! But you never spoke, you never wrote; how was I to know you weren't tired of your amusement?"

       There was a sudden intensity of passion in her voice that had, in spite of herself, in spite of her pride, swept away the barrier of reticence she had been fighting to maintain; the temptation had come to her when she was weakest — lonely, overwrought, humiliated by her husband's sneers.

       She went on quickly, speaking almost hysterically in the low, repressed tones:

       "I saw my sister Ethel marry deliberately for money. I knew she cared for another man; but the man she loved was poor, there seemed so little prospect then that Jim Meredith —" she checked herself, too late to prevent the name involuntary escaping her, "that the man would ever be anything else but poor; his work lay out in India; there must needs be a long waiting, and perhaps exile to India for her in the end. She weighed love in the balance against money, and money won. She married Mr. Restarrick, and I blamed her. I who would have chosen love; money would not have tempted me as it tempted her, weighed against the love of a man I cared for."

       She spoke passionately, as though she would justify herself; she went on rapidly, with an intensity of feeling that he had never heard in her voice before:

       "Even though my mother, ever since Ethel and I were children, was always urging upon us that we were to make a good marriage — which meant a rich marriage — it wouldn't have weighed with me one iota; I would have faced poverty with a smile with the man I cared for: only that man never spoke, never let me know he cared. He went away — and then . . . . . and then I married John Sarrol."

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

The principal characters in the story are Jim Meredith, heir to his uncle, who has cut out of his will his adopted daughter, Olive Lindsay, because she was convicted of stealing pearls; Percival Detmold, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, who is found in his house at Llandaff shot through the heart, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering; Eva Kennedy, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, an, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station; Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart, and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident and suspects; Owen Hughes, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets John Sarrol, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow. Hughes and Sarrol adjourn to the library, where the whisper, which is an accusation that Hughes murdered Percival Detmold, is repeated. Hughes denies this, and declares Detmold threatened him with a revolver, which, in the struggle with Hughes, went off inadvertently and killed Detmold. Sarrol flouts this, and shows Hughes a letter he is going to send denouncing him. Then tells him to come back at nine o'clock, when he (Sarrol) will tell him what he intends to do. "The shadow of something coming" broods over more than one member of the Muir dinner party that night, and later Beatrice Sarrol and Philip Muir, who were formerly in love with each other, saunter through the grounds, in earnest conversation.

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CHAPTER XVI. (continued.)
THE MAN AND THE WOMAN.

       "But I always cared, Beatrice," he said again. Her words had fanned his passion. Never before had she seemed so desirable, so beautiful to him as now.

       "I wonder if you ever cared as much as I cared?" she said slowly. "If only you'd said one word, that word I waited and longed far — that word that never came! And then in pique — yes, pique with you, because I was heart-sick and my pride was angry — I promised John Sarrol." She paused; then in a changed voice: "I spoke of to-day as being my unlucky day. Can't you guess what I was thinking of? To-day is the anniversary of the day I said I would be his wife. And not a day since but I've cursed that moment. Oh, how he has made me suffer!"

       The cry broke from her, involuntary, resistless, with a fierce intensity.

       "You mean that he ill-treats you? — more I mean than by his sneers and words?" Philip whispered hoarsely. "I could have struck him over the dinner-table across his face more than once to-night! Beatrice, has he ——"

       "Oh, I couldn't tell even you everything . . . . You saw him at his best to-night," she said, wearily. "And, perhaps — well, I suppose I have much that from my childhood my mother taught me one should look for above everything in marriage. He is generous at least, my husband; he likes to see me well-dressed, likes me to be a credit, to him —–"

       Beatrice Sarrol broke off short, with, a deep breath of unconquerable loathing.

       "Philip, I sometimes think there is a greater sin in making such a marriage as mine, in marrying such a man, than in what most people would call sin! He's a drunkard . . . . to be tied to such a man night and day — can't you realise the horror of it?" Her hands were clenched passionately. "Why am I telling you this, I wonder? I never whispered a word of it before, not even to my sister. I never meant to say it to you — not a word, not a hint . . . . only, I suppose I'm nervous, full of fancies to-night. And I suppose there is a point where endurance snaps — or, rather, weakens for a moment under the strain, for to-morrow I shall take up my burden again —–"

       "Then he does ill-treat you?" said Philip, in a low, dangerous voice.

       "Oh, not physically — except when he has been drinking . . . . and there are things harder to bear than blows."

       "You mean he has struck you, this brute; — you whom I cared for, whom I once dreamed of making mine?" still in the quiet voice, with a mounting, underlying passion, as though the spark were creeping along the laid train to the point where it would flash into devastating fury.

       "Don't say too much, Philip. I've let myself get out of hand as it is. . . . I'm not used to pity or sympathy. And there are plenty of women who envy Mrs. John Sarrol, of Newport, who has all her desires gratified; everything she wants. My God! everything she wants!"

       "You must tell me this, Beatrice! You shall tell me!"

       Her fight to remain loyal to the husband she loathed seemed weakened to breaking point. She stood, not looking at him, not speaking, with a white, drawn face. Then with a little sob that spelt surrender, she suddenly slipped the white evening dress a little from off one shoulder, revealing to his eyes an ugly, livid bruise on the white, smooth skin.

       The last barrier was down. The sight of that bruise was like a match set to powder. She was in his arms, held tight. There was a moment's silence, broken only by the sobbing of the woman — sobbing that shook her slender frame — who, her power to resist beaten down, had surrendered herself to his arms.

       "This must be the end!" Philip cried with an intensity of fierceness, his face dark. "After that blow you shan't go back to this man! You belong to me. It maddens me to think of your soft arms bruised by this drunken brute who had forfeited his claim! I feel I could strike him dead for this blow! You must not, shall not go back to him! You belong to me by the right of our love!"

       Behind them, but a yard or two away, in that guilty, passion-swayed moment, in the grey panel of dusk that framed the darkness of the library, merely a deeper blot of shadow among the shadows of the unlighted room behind on that dark side of the house, a figure stood unsuspected, listening with a spasm of vindictive fury and hatred on his face, watching them — man and woman. John Sarrol.

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CHAPTER XVII.
A CRY IX THE DARKNESS.

       John Sarrol had won his game of billiards, as he had won so many other games in life; and then, in rare good humour at his victory — for it had been a close game, and at one time it had looked like his losing — he had excused himself for a few minutes to his host, whom he left in the billiard-room beginning a game of fifty-up with his son Alfred.

       A "fifty" game with Alfred usually averaged the time of a hundred-up with another player, for young Muir carried his business habits of method to the game, and usually deliberated as long before each stroke as though he were deciding some knotty commercial point involving hundreds.

       "I won't be ten minutes, Muir; just going to the library, if I may — I want to write a letter. I'll be back before you finish your game," Sarrol had said, not mentioning that he was going to meet Owen Hughes there. That might have necessitated some explanation.

       It had not been until he and his host adjourned to the billiard-room after dinner that Sarrol had come to a decision about Hughes, what course he should take. In a grim spirit of irony he had told himself that the game he was about to play with Muir should decide his course of action for him; the thought had tickled his sense of humour. If he won his hundred-up with Muir, he would let the man go; if he lost, then he would carry out his threat and communicate to the police the nature of the message he had received by telephone from Detmold shortly before his death. And this resolve, to which he fully meant to adhere, lent all the interest of a gamble to the game.

       Sarrol had started badly; at first it had looked as though the threat would have to be carried out — that he would lose, and Hughes would accordingly lose, too. For the first five minutes of the game he felt more or less indifferent; then he had begun to get keen.

       He had no love for Hughes, who had called him a thief, but the mere abstract fact that he was playing, if not for a man's life, at least for his liberty, that a man's future was the issue at stake — for Sarrol knew how difficult, if not impossible, it would be for Hughes to clear himself once the police knew of that telephone message — began imperceptibly to weigh with him; he grew keen — the more so, as Muir was playing well.

       Break by break Muir's score was mounting up, leaving him behind; but in the fifties a series of good strokes, and Sarrol drew almost level with his opponent; they ran neck and neck into the sixties. Then a run of luck carried Muir in a single break to 90 odd, and Owen Hughes's chances looked hopeless.

       "I'm going to thrash you, Sarrol!" said Stephen Muir, with a complacent chuckle, as he marked his score on the board.

       The laugh and the words put Sarrol on his mettle, and a gleam came into his eyes. He took up his cue, playing carefully, as he had never played in his life before.

       "It isn't safe to prophesy until you know," was Sarrol's dry response — and between Muir's laugh and Sarrol's answer the latter was in the nineties too, within a couple of points of his opponent's score, after rather a good break.

       Muir was not a man to play a losing game so well as a winning one; that the other man had nearly caught him up affected his play. He miss-cued, and looked unhappy. Sarrol took up his cue and "ran out."

       The winner gave a dry chuckle. His skill in fighting a losing game had saved Hughes. He had no intention of going back just as, in the event of his having lost, he would not have spared the man; Sarrol always kept these bargains with himself.

       Well, on the whole, this result would save a lot of bother. He would hate had to explain why it had taken him a fortnight to inform the police that Percival Detmold, shortly before the moment of his death, had rung him up on the 'phone, and had told him that Hughes was at his place in a dangerous mood. And then, too, the grounds of the quarrel must have come out — Hughes's assertion, obtaining the wide publicity of the press, that he was being cheated between Detmold and Sarrol in the matter of that anti-fouling paint for ships that he, Sarrol, was going to float as a company and make a hat of money out of — whatever the shareholders might ultimately do!

       No, on the whole, John Sarrol, was rather glad. for other reasons than the personal satisfaction that winning always gave him, that the game had turned out as it had done. And, after all, Hughes was a relative, if a distant one, of the Muirs; the exposure he had contemplated might have led to an awkwardness with the Muirs. But he would make Hughes eat humble pie before he tore up in the younger man's presence that letter addressed to the superintendent at the Penarth police-station. He was not to be called a thief with impunity.

       And with these thoughts in his mind John Sarrol had gone to the library some five or six minutes to the half-hour after nine.

       He had passed into the dark Toom, shutting the door behind him, with a laugh still on his lips. His hand was on the switch of the electric light, when the sound of voices came to him through the open French window from the verandah outside. And instead of switching on the light, Sarrol paused, listening.

       His wife's voice: whom was she speaking to — and what was she saying? He could not distinguish the words, but there was an agitation in the tones that struck him. And then a man's voice — and the man's voice was excited, too: Philip Muir's. The laugh left his lips. Without turning on the light John Sarrol strode across the thick Turkey carpet noiselessly to the open window.

       There by the window he stood watching, like a figure of stone; and the heavy face was not good to look at. Hughes was forgotten. This was something that touched him more nearly.

       The two figures in the shadow there, their faces indistinguishable in the dusk, were silhouetted against the distant vista of moonlight, revealing their movements clearly to the watching man. For a moment or two he stood motionless, listening. The thing had broken upon him incredulously: at first he seemed half doubtful of his own faculties of sight and hearing . . . this, a familiar, hackneyed commonplace of the daily press — but to have touched his life personally! He had a curious sensation as of a diver going down in deep water and coming to the surface again. His wife . . . John Sarrol's wife . . . in this man's arms! It seemed unbelievable — but it was true.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

The principal characters in the story are Jim Meredith, heir to his uncle, who has cut out of his will his adopted daughter, Olive Lindsay, because she was convicted of stealing pearls; Percival Detmold, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, who is found in his house at Llandaff shot through the heart, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering; Eva Kennedy, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, an, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station; Ethel Restarrick, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart, and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident and suspects; Owen Hughes, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets John Sarrol, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Heated words follow, Sarrol strikes at Hughes, the latter is about to strike back when Stephen Muir appears and separates them. Sarrol turns to Hughes and whispers something which makes him recoil as from a blow. Hughes and Sarrol adjourn to the library, where the whisper, which is an accusation that Hughes murdered Percival Detmold, is repeated. Hughes denies this, and declares Detmold threatened him with a revolver, which, in the struggle with Hughes, went off inadvertently and killed Detmold. Sarrol flouts this, and shows Hughes a letter he is going to send denouncing him. Then tells him to come back at nine o'clock, when he (Sarrol) will tell him what he intends to do. "The shadow of something coming" broods over more than one member of the Muir dinner party that night, and later Beatrice Sarrol and Philip Muir, who were formerly in love with each other, saunter through the grounds, in earnest conversation. Sarrol surprises them in a close embrace.

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CHAPTER XVII. (continued.)
THE MAN AND THE WOMAN.

       And then his voice out harshly through the summer night, and the man and the woman, caught by their passion as in a swirling eddy of a tideway, were brought back with a start to the realities.

       No outburst of ungovernable fury at first; outwardly calm, cold as ice; his face grey white, only the eyes like gleaming steel-points revealing the pent-up, seething passions within him, as he stepped a pace or two forward. His voice calm, too, as he spoke, though it shook a little despite his iron control, coldly ironical:

       "I always knew I'd let myself in for a damned bad bargain when I gave you my name, but until now I thought at least you had some rags of decency left," John Sarrol said.

       Beatrice's face might have been cut in marble; every drop of blood seemed to have left it, with fear's imprint frozen there. Philip stood looking at John Sarrol, too startled and disconcerted in that first moment to find words.

       "It seems an interesting tete-a-tete that I have been so tactless as to interrupt," went on Sarrol, finding the effort of repression increasingly difficult — "pouring out the story of your wrongs, of your husband's cruelties, in another man's ears, giving yourself to this philanderer's arms! There's only one word for women like you." And still in the low, restrained voice he flung the vile word at her, like a handful of mud in her face.

       The word was like a goad to Philip Muir. He strode forward passionately, his eyes gleaming, his hands clenched — up to the other man.

       "Don't dare to say another word to her! Don't dare, I say, or I won't answer for the consequences. You may say what you like about me — but be very careful for your own sake how you speak again to her! You have no longer a weak, helpless woman to bully with your words and blows, but a man!" Philip said. "You've been listening, and for once a listener has heard the truth about himself: pleasant or not — the truth!"

       The suppressed fury broke out at last in John Sarrol.

       "I wonder you dare speak to me, you philanderer and thief of a man's honour!"

       And almost before the words had left his lips, Sarrol, his passion flaming out beyond control, aimed a blind blow at the younger man — a blow that would have felled Philip had he not moved quickly to avoid it; it merely grazed his cheek. Instantly Philip retaliated. His hand shot out, struck Sarrol in the face, who reeled back staggering under the force of the blow almost to the threshold of the library window; then, all the sleeping devil in him roused to a pitch of vindictive fury, to the lust for reprisals, he closed with the younger man.

       He was of immense natural strength; in spite of his bulk, in spite of his habits of living, his muscles — now, at any rate, in this madness of passion — were steel. The two men swayed for an instant by the French window, struggling blindly, savagely, like primeval men, whilst the woman stood, as if struck powerless to move or cry out, one hand pressed to her heart, in the deep shadow cast by the verandah.

       Philip Muir was a strong man, too, but the older man's grip was like a vice against which he struggled in vain; Sarrol's face and gleaming eyes, close to his, vindictive and sinister, were alight with a sudden murderous glint, as they swayed in their silent struggle by the dark opening of the long window. Suddenly exerting all his brute strength, Sarrol flung the other man off, hurled Philip away from him savagely into the unlighted room; and the younger man went down with a thud, the sound deadened by the heavy Turkey carpet, his cheek striking against the leg of the oak writing table.

       "I'll mark you, you philanderer, you thief of a man's honour!" broke from Sarrol following his fallen antagonist into the room, the darkness of which suddenly swallowed the two men up from Beatrice's terrified eyes.

       It was darker to her eyes than it was to the two men within the room, each swayed now by that one blind, savage, primitive instinct of passion to kill; less dark to them because of the moonlight in the garden beyond the verandah, against which objects in the room stood out dimly, blurred and black. Only it was more by instinct than by sight that the hand of one of the men fell on something lying on the table; something hard and heavy on which his fingers tightened. A blackthorn stick that Owen Hughes had left behind him inadvertently after his interview here with John Sarrol an hour and a half ago.

       What was happening in the room?

       In spite of her appalled horror and fear, in spite of her desperate eagerness to know, the woman out on the verandah had no power over her limbs; she might have been turned to stone; all her senses seemed absorbed in the one faculty of hearing. She stood listening. What was happening in the room hidden from her eyes by that veil of impenetrable darkness?

       She could hear the heavy breathing, a low, muttered word or so, the sound of movements, but the antagonists were strangely and grimly silent And then —–

       Out of the darkness a sharp, strangled cry that was hardly human, that died away almost instantly, simultaneously with a dull, heavy fall, most of the sound of which the thick carpet seemed to absorb. Then silence utter and absolute.

       The spell of dreadful inertia that had paralysed her seemed suddenly to snap.

       Instinctively Beatrice Sarrol knew that the struggle had become tragedy. Which man had given that cry? She ran forward to the window; her own words spoken earlier that evening: "dark and sinister, like a grave!" and those vague, oppressive fancies of coming ill swept back upon her now.

       In the room someone was breathing heavily — someone who did not speak aS she entered, someone whom she could not see. Which man — which man?

       To Beatrice Sarrol's overstrung nerves, that played strange tricks with her senses, the room with its darkness and stillness and the tragic secret it held seemed suddenly to fill with innumerable whisperings. She felt her way to the table blindly, filled with an almost irresistible, hysterical desire to scream, her skirts touching something on the floor as she passed.

       On the library table, near the silver candlestick and tray for sealing-wax, was a box of matches; the fact must have impressed itself on her mind quite unconsciously. Her fumbling, impatient fingers felt for the little silver box, found it. Which man had given that horrible cry?

       Beatrice Sarrol struck a match; the scratching sound of the match head on the box rapped jarringly on her nerves; the match flared up, throwing a little, wavering tongue of light in the great room, before which the shadows fell back, like shifting waves, into the sea of darkness beyond. Which man?

       Standing by the table, his passion burnt out, shaking in every limb, evidently making a desperate fight to master the mad impulse to give way to blind terror, afraid even to speak lest his voice should run out of his control to panic, was Philip Muir; and at her feet lay her husband, one arm bent under him, a terrible discoloured bruise, almost a pulp, on the left temple, where the heavy blackthorn stick had descended in a crushing blow, the dead eyes staring up at her.

       The match died out between her fingers. How she succeeded in strangling the cry that rose in her throat Beatrice never knew.

       "Philip — Philip, he's dead!" she said at last in a shaking whisper in the darkness.

       In spite of her horror, the woman forced herself to an unnatural calm; she bent and felt the pulse, laid her hand on the heart of the figure on the floor.

       "Philip, you've killed him!"

       "Oh, that can't be — I tell you it's impossible; he'll come round presently — he can't be dead! He was stronger than I . . . . more like a madman and he meant mischief — I believe he meant to kill me . . . . and I had to defend myself. But he can't be dead — I won't believe that he's dead!"

       The breathlessly rapid, staccato words, hardly articulate, were quite unlike Philip Muir's voice.

       "Hush! Don't speak, Philip!" came the woman's insistent, agonised whisper of caution through the darkness.

       Pity was in her voice: pity for the living, and perhaps a sudden, deep, remorseful pity for the dead whom in that moment of weakness and temptation she had wronged — with a wrong of which this was the evil fruit.

       "Philip, now if ever in all your life it is imperative you must keep yourself in hand; you must not lose your head. We've got to face facts; it is useless to deceive ourselves. John Sarrol's dead — and what remains now is to save you from the consequences! Listen!"

       Through the deep shadow of the room Beatrice Sarrol stole across to the door; stood listening feverishly.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

CHAPTER XVIII.
NOT A HARD WOMAN — USUALLY.

       For a moment Beatrice Sarrol stood there in the darkness of the room with her ear to the door, listening feverishly. Then very cautiously she opened the door an inch; a long, narrow slit of light from the corridor outside fell slantingly across the room, touching the grim thing on the floor. From the billiard room came the sound of voices, following a click of the balls — Alfred's precise, unemotional voice: "That was a fluke; you can't say you played for that shot, father!" And a burst of laughter from Stephen Muir — bringing an almost overpowering relief of re-assurance to the listening woman. From further away in the house stole very faintly the sound of a piano — Elsie playing in the drawing room, but no other sound.

       It seemed almost beyond belief to this woman: the dead man lying here — and yet in all this great house, about which to-morrow all Penarth, all Cardiff, would be speaking, no other sound but Stephen Muir's laughter, Alfred's dry, protesting, clerkly voice, Elsie playing at the piano.

       No alarm in the house yet. The billiard room was the nearest room to the library — and father and son had heard nothing, suspected nothing, as if by some miracle. Solid walls and doors and a thick carpet had conspired in the keeping of the secret. The servants' hall was remote, on the other side of the house. Safe so far!

       Beatrice closed the door softly; noiselessly she turned the key, and not switching on the light stole across to the window, whispering re-assurance to the man whom she could only see, very dimly outlined, standing supporting himself by the table, as she passed. At the window as at the door nothing to alarm her — no sound of hurrying feet, no surge of white, scared faces bursting in on her, of startled, questioning voices, as her imagination had at her first sight of the dead man pictured as inevitably following the tragedy almost at once. Silence outside as within. She stepped out on to the verandah and looked up and down; no one about. Re-assured, she passed into the room again, closed and fastened the windows, pulled the heavy curtains across them. Then she switched on the electric light.

       "Philip." She touched his arm gently. "No one suspects anything yet. Pull yourself together — we must think of some way to save you. Pull yourself together."

       He was shuddering convulsively; his eyes stared down as if fascinated at the upturned face on the floor. He was utterly shaken, unnerved, helpless. The woman saw it; realised that if anything could be done it must be she to plan it, to carry the plan out.

       "I swear I never meant to kill him . . . . I just struck blindly, as he was rushing at me again . . . . how was I to know it would kill him?" he said in a dazed, helpless way.

       "Philip, you must pull yourself together!" The woman's tones were decisive, resolute; all the weakness and tears of a few minutes ago gone. The situation had made a call on her self-reliance, and some unsuspected, latent quality of strength, amazing in this ordinarily shrinking, fragile woman, responded to the summons. "Don't let your mind dwell on what is past, on what is irreparable — it's the future we must think of; it's the next few minutes that count! Don't waste time or words in justifying yourself to me; it isn't needed, Philip. Oh, I blame myself most of all — I blame myself for my weakness that brought this thing about! We must be quick and think of something, form some plan. For the moment no one suspects — but for how long are we safe? Owen Hughes was to come here, to this room, to see my husband at half past nine; it must be nearly that now! Oh, surely, there must be some plan by which we can prevent suspicion falling an you!"

       She swept her eyes desperately round the room, though out of the present security and secrecy of drawn curtains end closed doors she would evolve some future safety. Her wild eyes alighted on the big four-fold oak screen standing in one corner.

       "The first thing to do is to hide — it." A little shudder ran through her voice, "Help me, Philip — oh, nerve yourself; you must nerve yourself unless suspicion is to fall on you; and it must never do that. Philip!" she whispered in an agonised tone to the man who stood as if dazed and stupefied.

       But he was beyond the power of helping her; the physical repulsion of the task made him helpless. With surprising strength and nerve in one so frail, the woman dragged the lifeless figure over the floor, behind the screen in the far corner of the room, stirred with a dreadful, remorseful horror and pity.

       "Often — often I have wished myself free — but, God knows, not in this way!" she whispered as though to the dead ears.

       Something was lying on the carpet near the window, a crumpled envelope; her restless eyes fell on it. Beatrice Sarrol stooped and picked it up. It was the envelope addressed to the superintendent of the police-station at Penarth, that she had seen before dinner. The letter was inside. Evidently the dead man had been holding it clenched in his hand at the moment when he first heard their voices on the verandah, and unconsciously it had fallen from his grasp then as he stepped out to reveal himself. She had seen the envelope before, but the letter John Sarrol had prevented her from seeing. She tore it open, and read the lines written in her husband's big, sprawling, unmistakable hand:

       "I can furnish proof that Owen Hughes of —— Street, Cardiff, went to Mr. Detmold's house shortly before the murder, and that a fierce quarrel took place between the two men, and that Hughes' threatened Detmold. Unless you arrest the man at once he will probably bolt."

       And then the big, sprawling signature, "John Sarrol."

       She read it twice, staring amazedly at the words, as though at first her overwrought nerves could not grasp the fact the note stated. Then a gleam flashed into the woman's eyes.

       "You say Hughes is coming here to the library, at half past nine?" Philip's voice came to her, falling with a strange appositeness across her thoughts, as though the significance of that statement of hers a moment or two ago had only just come to him.

       "Yes; Owen Hughes — who killed Mr. Detmold at Llandaff!" she cried. "Read that!" She thrust the letter into Philip's hand. "Do you see, my husband had discovered his guilt, was going to inform the police — this letter proves it! If my husband had lived the man would have been arrested, charged with murder. Do you understand, Philip?" she cried. "Listen! He's coming now — those must be his footsteps!" She snatched the letter from his hand. "Hide — hide behind those curtains! He mustn't see you — above everything, he must not see you now; no one must see you! I'm going to save you, Philip!"

       What plan had she? The wheels of his brain seemed to move too sluggishly for comprehension. Philip obeyed her mechanically, but what she meant or what she purposed doing he did not know; the effort even of speculation was beyond him. His mind seemed only capable of one thought — the thought of the dead man behind the oak screen in the far corner, the men he had hated so in life.

       He moved out of sight behind the heavy curtains of the window, like a man in a dream. Presently, no doubt, the element of personal fear would sweep in on him, but in those first few minutes the shock of horror seemed to have left him dazed.

       "Don't speak, don't move," she whispered insistently. "Leave all to me."

       She went oat of the room. Beatrice had heard footsteps on the gravel path, then on the verandah: footsteps that could only be Owen Hughes's. She walked quickly to the garden door that was at the end of the corridor close by the library; as she opened the door she came face to face with Hughes, as she had expected — the man on his way to see John Sarrol.

       "You have come to see my husband, I think?" she said, closing the garden door behind her as she stepped out on the dark verandah.

       "Yes, Mrs. Sarrol."

       Naturally, she was far from being a hard woman; rather, indeed, the reverse, a woman whose sympathy and compassion were easily touched, and more than superficially touched; a woman who hated cruelty and suffering in any form: not a hard woman, until now. Now, she seemed to have been re-moulded in the crucible of circumstance. She was going to be pitiless to a man who had never injured her; only it was less that she was ignoring the suffering she would entail on this man than that she was hardly conscious of it.

       In the supreme selfishness of a woman desperate to save someone she loves, he hardly stood in her thoughts for more than a mere instrument fate had put into her hands; her mind was too utterly filled with the one fixed idea of saving Philip, to have room for estimating another's suffering. And was not this man a murderer? John Sarrol's letter said that he was a murderer, and evidently John Sarrol if he had lived had meant to denounce him to the police.

       "My husband cannot see you to-night. I have come in his stead, with a message from him. He has decided to send that letter you know of to the police authorities," she said.

       The man's face went a shade paler.

       "You can t mean that?" he cried unsteadily.

       She was hardly conscious of the pain and dread in his eyes and voice; it was almost as though a second sub-conscious self, obsessed with the one fixed idea that made her deaf and blind to all other considerations, was speaking. She spoke almost mechanically, as though repeating a lesson:

       "You know his stubbornness — just as you know best what words passed between you and him to anger him so: you know how unforgiving he is. That is the final word. As we drive back to Newport to-night he is going to inform the police about your connection with that crime at Llandaff. Until then — well, you have an hour's grace. Make the most of your hour! I tell you words are useless; they can't move him. It is for you to have made such good use of that hour that when the police look for you they may look in vain."

       "Mrs. Sarrol, I told your husband how it happened — he must know that, in spite of appearances, I —" he began brokenly, desperately, with agony in his voice. "Oh, won't you intercede with him for me? It can do him no good to speak — and it means my ruin."

       "I can do nothing. No appeal or intercession of mine would help you now." Not a hard woman — until now: the appealing agony in his face cut even through that one absorbing idea that seemed to have drugged her mind and left it sealed to pity, she could not look into his face. But she steeled herself. It was this man or Philip — and had her husband lived this man would have been charged with the death of Detmold. It was this man or Philip! "Oh, why won't you take my advice, and make the most of your hour? When my husband makes up his mind he is implacable; nothing can alter his determination. Go at once."

       She spoke in a fever of impatience, desperate to be back, before anyone should go into the library and stumble on the secret before the time was ripe — a very fever of impatience that made her voice thin and strained.

       She seemed to hypnotise him — she or the definite falling of the blow that he had hoped desperately against hope might yet be averted. Hughes thought of the girl to whom not so many hours ago, here in this very garden, he had whispered his dream — what an awakening from that dream! No more to touch her hand, or listen to her voice!

       Without a word, almost like a drunken man, Owen Hughes turned as if dazed by the blow and walked blindly away.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

FOR NEW READERS.

       This thrilling serial began in the "Evening Express" on November 7. Back numbers can be obtained from any newsagent, or direct from the publisher. The following outline enables new readers to commence the story to-day.

Characters in the Story.

JIM MEREDITH, heir to his uncle's great wealth, and now head of the firm of Meredith, Muir, and Co. OLIVE LINDSAY, old Meredith's adopted daughter, cut out of his will because she was convicted of stealing pearls. PERCIVAL DETMOLD, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, found shot through the heart at his house in Llandaff, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering. EVA KENNEDY, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, and, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station. ETHEL RESTARRICK, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident, and suspects. OWEN HUGHES, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets JOHN SARROL, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Sarrol retorts by accusing Hughes of Detmold's death. Hughes replies that it was an accident. Sarrol declares he is going to set the police on to Hughes, but promises to hold his hand until nine o'clock that night, when he arranges to meet Hughes again. BEATRICE SARROL and PHILIP MUIR, formerly sweethearts, who meet at dinner that night and afterwards in the grounds of Muir's house, exchange confidences. Sarrol surprises his wife in Philip Muir's arms. A fierce quarrel and fight follow, and Philip Muir kills Sarrol with a blow from a stick left behind by Hughes. Mrs. Sarrol plots to save Philip from the consequences. She meet Hughes when he returns to see Sarrol, tells him her husband has resolved to denounce him, but allows him an hour's grace. She suggests that Hughes should fly at once.

Scene of the Story To-day — Penarth.

---

CHAPTER XVIII. (continued.)
NOT A HARD WOMAN — USUALLY.

       Beatrice Sarrol drew a deep breath.

       "But he killed Percival Detmold," she whispered to herself fiercely, as though she would justify her action against her better self. "It isn't as though he were a man with nothing to fear — in any case, he killed Detmold."

       Back to the room to the living and the dead. Still the click of the ivory balls from the billiard room, as she stole along the corridor; no one about.

       "Philip," she whispered.

       "Beatrice, what did you mean? I caught your words to Hughes just now," Philip cried; that brief interview with Owen Hughes had taken place almost, on the other side of the window, behind the curtains of which he had been hiding. During those moments of her absence he seemed to have shaken off some of the numbing stupor. He was beginning to understated dimly. "You don't mean that you —–"

       She averted her eyes; she did not speak.

       "Oh, I see your plan! he cried. "You sent him away — drove him into fright from an imaginary danger, that suspicion of this might fasten on him? Beatrice, tell me, is that your plan?" There was horror in his face.

       "Philip, I couldn't bear to think of you being accused — of your suffering for this thing! Oh, I can't bear to think of it; it's too terrible — you whom I love!" she broke out wildly. "Philip, it's the only way to save you — it's forced on us! And he killed Detmold — he didn't even deny it to me."

       "Beatrice, I can't do it," he said hoarsely. "It's too horrible, too infamous, to accuse an innocent man!"

       "But we don't accuse him," she broke in eagerly, laying an imploring hand on his arm, looking into the weak, handsome face. "Let the police draw their own conclusions. When the alarm is raised, this letter my husband wrote will be found — and the stick . . . . you and I will know nothing; will have seen nothing, heard nothing! Let the police draw what conclusions they will. And he has his chance of flight — a chance he wouldn't have had if my husband had lived. It's not as though he were an innocent man with nothing to fear. Philip!"

       He shook off her detaining hand.

       "I can't do it, Beatrice — I can't! I know you haven't fully thought what it means; it's just a mad impulse of yours this — an impulse, a plan, that you would be the first to reject in cold blood, in your saner moments. You'd despise me for accepting my safety in this way — any woman would! We can't do it, Beatrice — we can't!" he cried feverishly; yet with a note of irresolution in his voice.

       "But, Philip — oh, I wouldn't suggest it, only I can think of nothing but what you have at stake, perhaps your life — certainly, your liberty: I can't bear to think of that! And my husband knew that Owen Hughes was a murderer —–"

       "I don't believe that of Hughes; I won't believe it! Beatrice, if I tell the truth, no jury could call it murder; surely, they'll believe me, that as we struggled in the dark I picked up the stick blindly, struck blindly in self-defence!" he cried.

       "Will they believe you?" she whimpered. "Oh, I'm afraid — afraid! Not murder; they wouldn't call it that — manslaughter: they'd put you in penal servitude for years — rob you of the best years of your life!"

       And at her words a shiver ran through the man.

       "The quarrel and the cause of it would all come out, to make the case blacker against you, to prejudice the jury against you; oh, I know, I know! The jury would find no rag of extenuation: in such cases the law's sentence is always harsh. Oh, Philip, Philip — for my sake! I couldn't bear it. For I was to blame for the quarrel — I ought not to have given way as I did to my weakness, to the temptation! Philip, what is this man to us, a man already stained with guilt?" Her smouldering eyes searched his face. "Come, we must get away from this room at once, extinguish the light, leaving the window open as we found it — leaving others to make the discovery!"

       "No, no; it's too vile."

       Yet there was a note of deepening indecision in his voice.

       His life had been too self-indulgent for Philip Muir to face steadily the prospect she had painted vividly to his imagination. Not murder — he would not be found guilty of murder; but of manslaughter without any extenuating circumstances.

       He had spent a day in court at the last assizes at Cardiff, had witnessed the merciless machinery of the law in motion. He had seen the bravado of a hulking ruffian in the dock break down utterly into a whimpering, sobbing appeal as he was sentenced to the "cat." Was his own courage less vulnerable? To stand himself in that same dock, and listen to his sentence — what would the sentence be? Five years, ten years? He had even heard of men getting twenty years' penal servitude for manslaughter.

       And the judge in his summing-up would dwell on the causes of the quarrel, would influence the jury, would point out that in the quarrel the dead man was the injured, not the injurer, who had seen the sanctity of has married life menaced . . . and Philip Muir shuddered, and the heads broke out on his brow. And the note of protest in his voice was weaker, as he said:—

       "Beatrice, don't tempt me! I — I've got to face the music; I —–"

       He broke off suddenly, listening.

       The woman had heard the sound, too — the opening of the garden door outside which she had spoken to Owen Hughes: someone entering, they heard the slow sound of footsteps coming along the corridor towards the door of the room. And Philip's face went whiter, and he drew a little, sobbing-breath; his hand trembling violently as it rested on the table.

       "Philip, the moment's come when you've got to choose once and for all," the woman's voice whispered through the moment's tense, strained silence, "whether I'm to save you or not. In another minute it will be out of my power or yours to save you, unless you choose now!"

       And as the words left her white lips there came a tap on the door.

---

CHAPTER XIX.
THE THIEF OF A MAN'S HONOUR.

       The moment had come when he must choose one alternative or the other.

       As the tap on the door reached them, the woman knew that it was Owen Hughes who had come back; it could only be Hughes. He must not see Philip here.

       She pointed to the curtains masking the window; her white lips framed the word she dared not utter aloud:—

       "Hide!"

       A moment in which to choose!

       Philip paused with an irresolute look; a feeling of shame. all the instincts of his better nature rose in revolt against panic's impulse to take the course urged, to save himself at another's expense. A moment in which to choose finally!

       The woman saw his irresolution; she made a frenzied movement of appeal, of command: "Hide!" — as the tap came again.

       With a little shivering intake of breath Philip Muir slipped behind the heavy folds of the curtain. It was the tacit surrender to a supreme cowardice.

       Almost simultaneously with the second tap, Hughes's voice outside said: "Mrs. Sarrol." The handle of the door moved; then the door opened.

       The woman turned to face him, feeling that she would need all her self-command. The strain was beginning to tell on her; she was almost at the end of her self-control. Why had he come back ? If only she had dared she would have switched off the light that the man might not see her face, but she feared to do anything that might arouse the slightest suspicion. She must play her part.

       "You!" as if surprised to see him, as she confronted Owen Hughes. "Are you mad, to come back?" she demanded, forcing herself to composure. Was the strain never going to end?

       "Mad or not, I've come back." Hughes had pulled himself together, since the shock of her words, carrying their ultimatum, that at first had dazed him — had sent him away almost without a fight or protest. "I've come back because I mean to see your husband, Mrs. Sarrol."

       The words terrified her; was her plan going to fail? She was terrified, too, lest the sound of his words should carry to other ears. It was a decisive moment when one false step might be fatal, when the slightest circumstance beyond her control might ruin everything: trifles so often in ways unforeseen, impossible to guard against, resolved themselves into shreds of suspicious evidence.

       He closed the door behind him and stood facing her in the lighted room.

       "I gave you my husband's message," she said. "He has no more to say; there is nothing more to be said. By waiting here you only narrow your chance of escape."

       In spite of herself, the woman glanced at the four-fold oak screen apprehensively, afraid lest anything showed from behind it —anything to arouse his suspicion.

       "Is your husband in earshot now — in this room?" Owen Hughes demanded suddenly, suspiciously, watching her face, following that swift, furtive glance to the screen. "Didn't I hear voices as I came in from the garden? Is he here, afraid of facing the man he has already robbed, and to whom he means to do this further injury?"

       He made a movement forward as he spoke. The woman felt as though icy fingers had touched her heart, stopping it in the middle of a beat. If once Owen Hughes looked behind that screen —–

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

COPYRIGHT.

---

FOR NEW READERS.

       This thrilling serial began in the "Evening Express" on November 7. Back numbers can be obtained from any newsagent, or direct from the publisher. The following outline enables new readers to commence the story to-day.

Characters in the Story.

JIM MEREDITH, heir to his uncle's great wealth, and now head of the firm of Meredith, Muir, and Co. OLIVE LINDSAY, old Meredith's adopted daughter, cut out of his will because she was convicted of stealing pearls. PERCIVAL DETMOLD, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, found shot through the heart at his house in Llandaff, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering. EVA KENNEDY, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, and, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station. ETHEL RESTARRICK, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident, and suspects. OWEN HUGHES, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets JOHN SARROL, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Sarrol retorts by accusing Hughes of Detmold's death. Hughes replies that it was an accident. Sarrol declares he is going to set the police on to Hughes, but promises to hold his hand until nine o'clock that night, when he arranges to meet Hughes again. BEATRICE SARROL and PHILIP MUIR, formerly sweethearts, who meet at dinner that night and afterwards in the grounds of Muir's house, exchange confidences. Sarrol surprises his wife in Philip Muir's arms. A fierce quarrel and fight follow, and Philip Muir kills Sarrol with a blow from a stick left behind by Hughes. Mrs. Sarrol plots to save Philip from the consequences. She meet Hughes when he returns to see Sarrol, tells him her husband has resolved to denounce him, but allows him an hour's grace. She suggests that Hughes should fly at once. Hughes demures, and suggests that Sarrol is within earshot, and he would see him.

Scene of the Story To-day — Penarth.

---

CHAPTER XIX. (continued.)
THE THIEF OF A MAN'S HONOUR.

       "No, no! He is not here!" she cried, almost hysterically, flinging herself swiftly in front of him. "I only dread that he should come back and find you here! Oh, why won't you go, why won't you listen to me? If he comes back and finds you here, be will be implacable. It was only at my pleading that he consented to give you an hour's grace. You know what he is when his anger is roused; you know what passed between you and him at your last interview —–"

       It was a shot in the dark; but she had known it was a stormy interview.

       "Yes, I know I called him a thief — and it was true!" he said stubbornly.

       She seized on the admission; she remembered how, as John Sarrol sat in an abstracted mood at dinner, his lips had formed a word. She understood now; it was that word "thief"; it was that that had, evidently, rankled so in John Sarrol's mind.

       "Yes, you called him a thief!" she cried, almost without a pause, "and that has made him relentless. You have nothing to hope for after that. You called him a thief — and because of that he'll make you suffer. Oh, I'm sorry for you, sorry — God knows!"

       The cry was torn from her involuntarily — plucked out of the heart of her poignant, remorseful feelings, that yet were not remorse; for her purpose stood stronger than all her pity for the man she was about to injure. She did not want this man to suffer — she only wanted to save Philip. Since someone must suffer, it must not be Philip.

       He saw the tears in her eyes, read the emotion in the strained voice; and a flicker of hope came to him.

       "You're a woman, a pitying woman — your husband will listen to you if not to me," he said in a low voice of appeal. "What satisfaction can it give him to ruin my future, as he has the power to do, though he knows Detmold's death was not murder? But he'll listen to you, you his wife — won't you intercede? I called him a thief; well, I'll retract that!"

       Beatrice Sarrol shook her head. The situation was becoming almost intolerable.

       "He'll never forgive that word. You ask his wife to intercede — hes he ever listened to me yet? Would he listen to me now? I know him too well. Oh, it's useless — why can't I convince you how useless this is? You have nothing to hope for: accept that fact, and act accordingly," she whispered feverishly. "Every moment is a precious one to you now. I know my husband; what you called him was unforgivable. Go, before he returns and finds you here. But for me he would not have given you even an hour's grace. I dread his returning to find you here; I dread his changing his mind and telephoning to the police at once. Go."

       Owen Hughes was looking at the woman closely. There was something about her he could not fathom — a furtiveness in her manner.

       "What is there behind all this?" he said suddenly. "Is there any other reason — a hidden reason — why, you don't want me to see your husband? Is there some trap being laid for me?"

       "The trap is being set only by your own delay. The golden moments are slipping by whilst you wait here, when you might be making your escape, putting yourself out of reach by the time the police are told who killed Percival Detmold. Why don't you make the most of your chance?"

       Pity and compassion were fighting for him, tearing her heart — but with never a chance against the set purpose that dominated her.

       Owen Hughes listened dully. A sense of impotent revolt against circumstances swept over him. An hour in which to fly — to be a hunted man henceforward, skulking in corners, crouching in hiding, in ever present fear of arrest: a dog's life! And if he took to flight, where was he to go, what was he to do? Whither the road led, stretching away from his feet, he did not know; he only knew that inevitably it led him away from the sweetest thing that had come to him in life — away from Elsie:

       "Go quickly!"

       He was convinced at last of the futility of his appeal, that only instant flight stood between him and arrest; persuaded at last.

       The door opened and the man passed out, and the door was strut again. But for an instant he lingered outside the door, and there was terror in the listening woman's face — the sudden dread that he had not accepted her words as final, but meant to go and look for Sarrol in the billiard-room. That would ruin everything.

       Then she heard his footsteps begin to move slowly towards the garden door by which he had entered — this scapegoat.

       As she stood there, Beatrice Sarrol wondered if anyone had ever before lived through such a crowded hour. The march of events had moved so swiftly — so amazingly swiftly — quarter of an hour at the most since that broken, stifled cry from the darkness that had ushered in the tragedy; swiftly, and so silently, that as yet no one suspected that with which to-morrow all this corner of Wales, where John Sarrol's name was one to conjure by in commercial and financial circles, would be ringing.

       She listened impatiently to the slow, receding footsteps: why didn't the man hurry, make the most of his time to escape? She wanted him to get clear away, this man driven into flight by lies. Lies — her feet were sinking in a morass of lies, lies to trap an innocent man! An hour ago Beatrice Sarrol could not have believed herself capable of such an act of treachery as this — a treachery she would not have been guilty of to save herself. Only it was Philip who had to be saved at any cost, Philip who had been drawn into the quarrel that had led to tragedy through her.

       "We are what fate makes us," she whispered suddenly.

       She loved Philip Muir — she had always loved him, with a depth of feeling that even her broken confession — that confession that she had never meant to make to him, only that temptation had assailed her when she was weakest — had perhaps hardly told him. Loved Philip, as he had never been capable of loving anyone but himself.

       Beatrice Sarrol dragged herself suddenly out of the feverish thoughts. Circumstances were fighting for her. The receding footsteps had reached the garden door, had passed on to the verandah; she heard the sound of the tread on the gravel, as she stood waiting, consumed with impatience till the coast should be clear. Fifteen minutes or longer since that grim drama had been played out in the darkness of this room: it seemed a miracle that they had been left undisturbed so long. But at any moment someone might come to the room — and if she and Philip were found there, her plan fell to the ground: their plea of knowing nothing that had happened would not hold water.

       The moment had come for the final moves in her desperate plan. They must be far away from the room before discovery came; it must not be known that they had been here at all.

       "Philip!"

       The footsteps had died away. It would be safe to steal out now. No time to lose.

       He stood by the curtains behind which he had remained hidden whilst Owen was in the room. Horror and shame and a touch of irresolution still showed in the grey set face that met hers across the library.

       "You thief of a man's honour!" The dead man's words, almost his last words, ran in Philip's mind; the phrase repeated itself again and again. And now a double thief — a thief in intent of Owen Hughes's honour! And he had liked Owen; they had been friends — and his hands were building up a wall of silence shutting off his friend from the power to clear himself! "The thief of a man's honour!"

       "Oh, Philip, Philip!" She made a sudden, appealing movement towards him. "Don't look at me like that," she cried. "I'm not a cruel woman, or a callous woman; only there are things beyond the limit of human endurance to bear; I couldn't bear to think of you suffering — and it was you or he! Blame the stuff we're made of — I couldn't act otherwise, caring for you as I do! It's my sin — my sin more than yours"

       Her sin — but when the Great Judge should pronounce the last sentence, judging between him and the man who was dead, what avail then to cry: "The woman tempted me!"

       "Quick, Philip; we must go now — now at once! You're not going to cancel all I've done?" she cried desperately. "Think of the alternative: you to lose your best years in prison, herding with the vilest of the vile, to come out at last a broken man, with the taint of the years in prison clinging to you, your future soured, ruined — all as a result of a moment's passion. Philip, I can't let you go to that fate! Look! That's what they'll sentence you for unless you let me do this!"

       Wildly, with an unconsciously dramatic gesture, Beatrice Sarrol pulled aside one fold of the screen, revealing the thing there: the dead man lying stark and still, with the stick near him, and the incriminating letter placed under one stiff hand; and she saw him shrink and whiten.

       After all, we accuse no one," she whispered temptingly, with a feverish light smouldering in her eyes. "We are silent, we know nothing, can tell nothing; that is all. Let the police draw what deductions they can and will; we neither help nor hinder them — we accuse no one, we know nothing!"

       Philip shuddered. The argument was specious enough, but from that letter there would only be one deduction to draw. But the sight of the dead man, the thought of that slow, ruthless machinery of the law that such an act must inevitably set in motion broke his nerve down, the last irresolute impulse to do the straight thing.

       "Oh, I'm a coward, a coward —–" His voice trailed off into faltering silence. It was the final surrender. This thief of a main's honour would be a double thief now.

       "Come, there's not a moment to lose; we must steal away now at once, whilst there's time!" Beatrice whispered in feverish impatience.

       She stole across and noiselessly locked the door, then turned off the light. Half-way across the room she paused on her way back to the window. Footsteps in the corridor outside, coming from the billiard-room — coming nearer.

       "Quick, we must be gone! There's someone coming!" she whispered desperately to the man, and her fingers felt and fumbled with the fastening of the folding windows as the footsteps stopped outside the room and the handle was turned of the locked door. And then the door was shaken impatiently.

       "Oh, quick, quick!"

TO BE CONTINUED ON MONDAY.

COPYRIGHT.

---

FOR NEW READERS.

       This thrilling serial began in the "Evening Express" on November 7. Back numbers can be obtained from any newsagent, or direct from the publisher. The following outline enables new readers to commence the story to-day.

Characters in the Story.

JIM MEREDITH, heir to his uncle's great wealth, and now head of the firm of Meredith, Muir, and Co. OLIVE LINDSAY, old Meredith's adopted daughter, cut out of his will because she was convicted of stealing pearls. PERCIVAL DETMOLD, one of the witnesses against Olive in the Black Pearl case, found shot through the heart at his house in Llandaff, and whom a woman is suspected of murdering. EVA KENNEDY, whom Jim finds on the road near Detmold's house on the night of the murder, and, at her request, conveys in his motor to Radyr Station. ETHEL RESTARRICK, a young widow, formerly Jim's sweetheart and a jealous woman, who hears of the last-named incident, and suspects. OWEN HUGHES, who is accepted by Elsie Muir, and, when leaving the Muirs' house at Penarth, meets JOHN SARROL, whom he accuses of having been in league with Detmold to rob him (Hughes) of his rights in a certain invention. Sarrol retorts by accusing Hughes of Detmold's death. Hughes replies that it was an accident. Sarrol declares he is going to set the police on to Hughes, but promises to hold his hand until nine o'clock that night, when he arranges to meet Hughes again. BEATRICE SARROL and PHILIP MUIR, formerly sweethearts, who meet at dinner that night and afterwards in the grounds of Muir's house, exchange confidences. Sarrol surprises his wife in Philip Muir's arms. A fierce quarrel and fight follow, and Philip Muir kills Sarrol with a blow from a stick left behind by Hughes. Mrs. Sarrol plots to save Philip from the consequences. She meet Hughes when he returns to see Sarrol, tells him her husband has resolved to denounce him, but allows him an hour's grace. She suggests that Hughes should fly at once. Hughes demurs, and suggests that Sarrol is within earshot, and he would see him.

Scene of the Story To-day — Penarth.

---

CHAPTER XX.
A DOOR THAT WAS LOCKED.

       As Beatrice Sarrol's desperate fingers fumbled with the fastening of the window, she heard the voice of the man outside who had just faintly tried door:

       "Sarrol — Sarrol — Are you there?"

       Was fate going to baffle them now at the last moment when the road had seemed clear? Perhaps it was the nervous haste of her trembling fingers — but she could not get the fastening undone. She felt nearly overcome after the long strain; only by an effort of will had she borne up so long.

       "Philip, I can't get the window unfastened!"

       He put out his hand; he knew the trick of the rather stiff catch; the window was opened at last; but with a little creaking sound, that seemed infinitely louder than it perhaps really was, to the frightened woman. A rush of cool night air met their faces, as they stepped out from the dark room into the deep shadow that lay on this side of the house.

       Then, as they walked away, cautiously, silently, swiftly, not daring to run lest the act should look suspicious, the door behind them by the side of the library — the door through which Owen Hughes had passed — was suddenly opened. A flood of light from within fell across the verandah, and a man stepped out. It was Stephen Muir.

       He saw dimly the two figures of the man and the woman walking away, and he cried out:

       "Is that you, Philip?" and made a step after them, past the open window of the dark room. "Hi, Philip!"

       The voice came to the two fugitives, bringing a start of guilty terror. They had been seen. It was useless to go on, to try to get away unnoticed now. They hard been recognised.

       "Philip — but he didn't see us come out of the library! In all you say, remember that. We were walking along the verandah, when the door opened," whispered Beatrice, trying to control her voice. "We've been anywhere but in the library, remember that! Everything hangs on your remembering that!"

.       .       .       .       .       .      .

       Stephen Muir had finished his short game with Alfred; he had won the game, making in the course of it one break of which he was immensely proud.

       "Wonder what's keeping Sarrol?" he had said to Alfred; "the ladies will be thinking long of us."

       And with the remark he had opened the billiard-room door, glancing down the corridor — in time to see the door of the library open and Hughes pass out with a dull, weary air: the door of the library was closed again — closed by someone within; Sarrol, no doubt.

       Stephen Muir was feeling angry with Hughes for the fracas of before dinner; he did not want Hughes to see him, and he stepped back quickly into the billiard-room, not closing the door, waiting until the younger man should have gone. He had discussed the brief, passionate scene that he had interrupted between Hughes and his guest with Alfred during the game.

       "Disgraceful — positively disgraceful. I hope Hughes has been to apologise for his unpardonable behaviour," was his comment to Alfred then.

       He heard Hughes go away slowly; waited till the roan was off the premises — he seemed to be a long time going, as it struck Stephen — and then the latter had walked out to find Sarrol.

       To his amazement, the library door was locked, evidently locked on the inside; and he could see that it was dark inside the room — yet he was perfectly sure that no one had come through that door since Hughes left; and someone had certainly been in the room then, Sarrol, of course. Muir was rather surprised. Perhaps Sarrol had gone out by the French windows; yet that was singular, for his guest had announced his intention of returning to the billiard-room in a few minutes. Besides, why should Sarrol have locked the door?

       Puzzled, Muir had walked to the door at the end of the corridor, and opening it had seen the two figures moving quickly away — a man who could only be Philip and someone in a white dress that gleamed in the dusk: Philip and Mrs. Sarrol.

       He walked after them, glancing in surprise at the dark room as he passed. It was the circumstance of the locked door that puzzled him. After his imperative cry the two figures had not dared but to wait.

       "I thought that was you, Philip," Stephen Muir said, coming up to them. "I'm looking for your husband, Mrs. Sarrol. I quite thought he was in the library?" There was no answer, he scarcely waited for one, as he added quickly: "Philip, why is the library door locked?"

       For a moment no answer, then Philip's dry lips framed the evasion:—

       "Is it locked?"

       "Didn't you know it was? Haven't you just been in there?" He could see their faces dimly, and there was something in the faces of each of them that puzzled him. "And you haven't seen Sarrol?"

       Philip's brain was numbed and confused by the horror of the passed hour, too much so for him to play his part well. Only he remembered the woman's warning, remembered that his father could not have seen them leaving the library window, and he said rather stammeringly:—

       "No, I haven t seen Mr. Sarrol. I noticed that the library was in darkness as Mrs. Sarrol and I came up from the garden on to the verandah; we've been enjoying the pleasant coolness, and then hurried back, thinking you might have finished your game."

       He was conscious of his father's eyes looking at him closely, and their scrutiny disconcerted him the more.

       "Am I to understand you have not just come from the library? Then who turned out the light a moment ago? Who locked the door? For no one has passed through the library door since Owen Hughes left, not two minutes ago, and the room was lighted then, and he could hardly have turned the key on the inside himself," added Stephen drily.

       The unexpected words fell like a live shell exploding, leaving the man and the woman in their partnership of guilt dumbfounded. Stephen Muir had seen Hughes go! He would know that in the space of time no third person could have left the library; Philip's assertion that the library was dark as they came up the garden stood revealed a lie on the face of it. Beatrice Sarrol's hand clutched the balustrade of the verandah, she could hardly stand, all the strength and self-reliance on which she had imposed such a strain seemed to have deserted her. She saw their house of lies shaking: brick by brick, lie by lie, it had been built — to fail in the end!

       Stephen Muir's face darkened. There was some mystery here, and he hated mysteries. Philip was evading the truth, Muir was sure of that, and that fact angered him. And what had become of Sarrol?

       "Come. Philip; that's nonsense," he said curtly. "Here, if Mrs. Sarrol will excuse me for a moment, I want just a word with you."

       He drew Philip aside.

       "What does all this mean?" he said, in a tone that meant to stand no trifling. "There's some mystery here — and I'm going to get to the bottom of it. You say it was not you who let Owen Hughes out — but someone must have done, for the room was lighted then; now it's dark and the door is locked. If it wasn't you or Mrs. Sarrol, it stands to reason you must have seen the person leave by this window, since you say you came across the garden to the verandah — for it's all happened within the last two minutes. And, come to think of it, I heard the click of the window opening almost as my fingers were on the handle of the garden-door: I opened the door an instant later, and you and Mrs. Sarrol were the only persons in sight. I want your explanation. We'd better talk inside."

       He strode through the window of the library, leaving Philip on the threshold.

       Stephen face was dark. Why had Philip deceived him? It was that thought that was worrying him. Probably Sarrol had walked round to the drawing-room ten minutes ago, after writing his letter; that was not improbable. Philip and Mrs. Sarrol had been in the library, had seen Owen Hughes there — and had lied about it. Why had they lied? The thing was so incomprehensible — that and their nervous, constrained manner. He was going to get to the bottom of it.

       Philip still stood on the threshold of the window; nothing could prevent the truth from coming out now. The white faced woman crept up to his side.

       "Oh, Philip, Philip — when the truth is known!"

       Stephen Muir crossed the room to the door, feeling his way in the dark; found the switch and turned on the electric light; he unlocked the door; then with a frown on his face he turned for Philip's explanation.

       "Here, Philip, I —–"

       The sentence was never finished. His eyes had fallen on the screen — on something that protruded a little beyond it; and he stopped dead, looking at it. From the window the eyes of the man and the woman watched him as if fascinated, waiting for the terrible cry that would break from him, alarming the house, bringing the frightened servants and Mrs. Muir and Elsie to the room.

       Then with a deep indrawn breath, and a paling in the ruddy face, Stephen Muir stepped forward — and Muir had found his guest. He stood staring down at the full, revealed horror of the thing; but only a stifled, gasping cry broke from him. "My God! My God!" he whispered. Then he staggered back, and sank heavily into a chair, still with riveted eyes, as though even yet he could not accept the tremendous fact that was hammering against his senses.

       Almost instinctively the woman's shaking hands pulled the curtain across the window of the lighted room, that might be a target for eyes outside. She stood, silent, scarcely seeming to breathe, as she watched Stephen Muir.

       The door opened; Alfred walked in; he had begun to talk almost before he opened the door, without any suspicion that anything was amiss:

       "My father's bragging about his big break, isn't he, Sarrol? But it began with a fluke —" he began in his precise tones; and then he saw his father sitting in a chair with a white face of horror, and Sarrol was not in sight; and a look of anxiety broke over his usually impassive, unemotional features.

       "Father!" He came quickly forward. "What's the matter?"

       He looked from his father to the figure of Mrs. Sarrol, to Philip; and then at the screen, as though his eyes were drawn there magnetically, even before his father's hoarse, shaking cry:

       "Look! — My God, look!"

       Alfred walked quickly forward.

       Even Alfred's self-possession nearly forsook him then, in the horror of seeing the man he had spoken to less than half an hour ago lying dead, with one side of his head smashed almost to a jelly, evidently by a savage blow.

       "What accident — but, great heavens, this wasn't an accident! How did it happen?"

       He looked from his father to the dead man's wife, to his brother. No one spoke.

[TO BE CONTINUED TO-MORROW.]

25 more instalments pending... (2023-feb-28)