ed for her own life. She dared not betray the
tiger-like Fritz Braun, whose veiled scheme of plunder or blackmail
she could not fathom.

Hitherto all had gone well with them, in their merry will-o'-the-wisp
game with Irma's jealous unknown guardians, with his concealed
enemies.

But Clayton well knew that no mere pretense would baffle Arthur
Ferris' thorough knowledge of all of his past social habits.

He dared not openly quarrel with Ferris until Jack Witherspoon's
return. He only lived now to see the Detroit lawyer speeding west,
far on ahead of the deceitful Ferris, who would be detained in
New York by the quiet consummation of the big deal.

Clayton was but too well aware that his only weapon was his knowledge
of Ferris' secret marriage--an outrage upon Alice Worthington's
unguarded girlhood.

And yet he dared not openly use that weapon; how easy for the old
capitalist to frame a suave excuse for the "maimed rites" of that
Western bridal.

One longing burned now in Clayton's heart, the honest wish to find
some dignified and safe place of meeting with the woman upon whom
he would shower the gold soon to be his own.

"If anything should happen," he thought.

Of course, his own face was too well known to adopt any mere hiding
tactics. Irma was ever fearful of her jealous artist guardians,
and in this lovely evening hour the lover's heart rose up in all
its stormy tenderness to beg her to lift the veil from her incognito.

Even while they murmured again their vows and drifted away into
dreams of the unclouded future, the heavens were blackening around
them.

Irma seemed strangely frightened as she cowered in her lover's
arms, while he begged her to lift the veil of her privacy.

"I must be with you--near you," he cried. "Listen! I have even
now grave matters hanging over me which may summon me suddenly
away from you. You know not my abode. You cannot write or telegraph
safely to my office.

"There are veiled spies, jealous rivals, there, who would rob me
of place, power, and the money which will yet be ours, in the dear
far-off Danube land.

"You have been ill, distressed," he fondly said. "Nay, do not deny
it! Madame Raffoni has told me all."

"My God!" whispered Irma. "She has told you"--

"Only that you have suffered, my darling," said Clayton, folding
her to his breast.

"Ah! I must make an end of it!" the loyal lover cried, as Irma lay
sobbing on his breast. "If I could only come to yo