lls mean "far?" Mrs. Argalls
meant as far as THAT--tendering her card and eminently respectable
address. Ah!--perhaps in a week. Not before? Perhaps before, unless
complications ensued; the patient had been much run down physically,
though, as Mrs. Argalls had probably noticed, he was singularly strong
in nervous will force. Mrs. Argalls HAD noticed it, and considered it
an extraordinary case of conviction--worthy of the closest watching and
care. When he was able to be moved she would send her own carriage and
her own physician to superintend his transfer. In the mean time he was
to want for nothing. Certainly, he had given very little trouble, and,
in fact, wanted very little. Just now he had only asked for paper,
pens, and ink.

CHAPTER VIII.

As Mrs. Argalls's carriage rolled into Fifth Avenue, it for a moment
narrowly grazed another carriage, loaded with luggage, driving up to a
hotel. The abstracted traveler within it was Paul Hathaway, who had
returned from Europe that morning.

Paul entered the hotel, and, going to the register mechanically, turned
its leaves for the previous arrivals, with the same hopeless patience
that had for the last six weeks accompanied this habitual preliminary
performance on his arrival at the principal European hotels. For he
had lost all trace of Yerba, Pendleton, Milly, and the Briones from the
day of their departure. The entire party seemed to have separated at
Basle, and, in that eight-hours' start they had of him, to have
disappeared to the four cardinal points. He had lingered a few days in
London to transact some business; he would linger a few days longer in
New York before returning to San Francisco.

The daily papers already contained his name in the list of the steamer
passengers who arrived that morning. It might meet HER eye, although
he had been haunted during the voyage by a terrible fancy that she was
still in Europe, and had either hidden herself in some obscure
provincial town with the half-crazy Pendleton, or had entered a
convent, or even, in reckless despair, had accepted the name and title
of some penniless nobleman. It was this miserable doubt that had made
his homeward journey at times seem like a cruel desertion of her, while
at other moments the conviction that Milly's Californian relatives
might give him some clew to her whereabouts made him feverishly fearful
of delaying an hour on his way to San Francisco. He did not believe
that she