ungo
waits for me."

"But, indeed, you must come in, Baron," she insisted. "There is
something of the greatest importance I have to say to you, and it need
not detain you ten minutes."

He followed her upstairs to her parlour. It was still early in the day
and there was something of the slattern in her dragging gown. As he
walked behind her, the remembrance would intrude of that betraying
letter, and he had the notion that perhaps she somehow knew he shared
her shameful secret. Nor was the idea dispelled when she stopped
and faced him in the privacy of her room with her eyes swollen and a
trembling under-lip.

"And it has come to this of it, Baron?" said she.

"It has come to this," said Doom simply.

"I cannot tell you how vexed I am. But you know my husband--"

"I have the honour, ma'am," said he, bowing with an old-fashioned
inclination.

"--You know my husband, a hard man, Baron, though I perhaps should be
the last to say it, and I have no say in his business affairs."

"Which is doubtless proper enough," said Doom, and thought of an irony
breeding forbade him to give utterance to.

"But I must tell you I think it is a scandal you should have to go from
the place of your inheritance; and your sweet girl too! I hope and trust
she is in good health and spirits?"

"My good girl is very well," said he, "and with some reason for
cheerfulness in spite of our misfortunes. As for them, ma'am, I am old
enough to have seen and known a sufficiency of ups and downs, of flux
and change, to wonder at none of them. I am not going to say that what
has come to me is the most joco of happenings for a person like myself
that has more than ordinary of the sentimentalist in me, and is bound to
be wrapped up in the country-side hereabouts. But the tail may go with
the hide, as the saying runs. Doom, that's no more than a heart-break
of memories and an' empty shell, may very well join Duntorvil and
Drimdarroch and the Islands of Lochow, that have dribbled through the
courts of what they call the law and left me scarcely enough to bury
myself in another country than my own."

Mrs. Petullo was not, in truth, wholly unmoved, but it was the actress
in her wrung her hands.

"I hear you are going abroad," she cried. "That must be the hardest
thing of all."

"I am not complaining, ma'am," said Doom.

"No, no; but oh! it is so sad, Baron--and your dear girl too, so sweet
and nice--"

The Baron grew impatient; the "something o