taken home. The father's eyes fell to the troubled
face, and without speaking he went with his daughter.

Mary and her father were hardly missed out of the bright party; but one
face became smoother when they had departed--the Beauty's. The gloom of
the public meeting brought out the brilliant elements of the gathering
with rare effect.

From group to group flashed Mrs. Carey, and her lips and eyes were less
eloquent than the clinging touch of her arm, which was almost a caress,
as she left or tried to leave her impression of sympathy and admiration
on one after another of the Royalists.

Two men she avoided, instinctively and deliberately--Geoffrey Ripon and
Sir John Dacre. Calculating, cool, unprincipled as she was, she feared
to meet the eyes of these two men, whose very lives she had undermined
and sold.

It was eleven o'clock and most of the ladies had gone, when the
beautiful woman, attended by Featherstone, drew her soft cloak round
her in her carriage and gave her hand, without a glove, to be kissed by
the big colonel, bending in the doorway.

"Your driver knows where to go?" asked Featherstone, closing the door.

"Oh, yes; straight home," answered Mrs. Carey, smiling; "good-night."

She lived in a quiet street on the south side of Regent's Park, and
thither she went. But when she reached Oxford Street she rang the
carriage bell and changed her course.

"Drive to Clapham Common," she said, curtly, "and as fast as you can."

It was a dark night, with a drizzling rain, and as the cab rattled along
the empty streets she lay back with closed eyes, evidently thinking of
no unpleasant things. It was over five miles to her destination, and
more than once on her way her thoughts brought a smile to her lips, and
once even an exultant laugh.

On the Battersea side of Clapham Common, in one of those immense old
brick houses built in the time of Queen Victoria, with trees and lawns
and lodges, lived a man whose name was known in every stock exchange and
money market in the world--Benjamin Bugbee, the banker.

From his devotion to the House of Hanover, in its glorious and its
gloomy fortunes, and from his intimate business relations with the royal
family, Bugbee had received the romantic title of "The King's Banker," a
name by which he was recognized even in other countries.

Bugbee was a small, bald-headed, narrow-chinned old man, with an air of
preternatural solemnity. From boyhood up, through all the stages