ourt heiress, and as long as the police don't lay hands
on you nobody else will trouble their heads about the affair; but if
you are suspected of being mixed up in the most remote way with
politics, your best friends will shun you like the plague."

"I will take your advice certainly," Godfrey said, "and even putting
aside the danger you point out, I should not be anxious to tell people
that I suffered myself to be entrapped so foolishly."

For some time, indeed, Godfrey found that his acquaintance fell away
from him, and that he was not asked to the houses of any of the Russian
merchants where he had been before made welcome. Cautious questions
would be asked by the younger men as to the trouble into which he got
with the police; but he turned these off with a laugh. "I am not going
to tell the particulars," he said, "they concern other people. I can
only tell you that I was fool enough to be humbugged by a pretty little
masker, and to get mixed up in a love intrigue in which a young lady,
her lover a captain in the army, and an irascible colonel were
concerned, and that the young people made a cat's-paw of me. I am not
going to say more than that, I don't want to be laughed at for the next
six months;" and so it became understood that the young Englishman had
simply got into some silly scrape, and had been charged by a colonel in
the army with running away with his daughter, and he was therefore
restored to his former footing at most of the houses that he had before
visited.

Two days after his release a note was slipped into Godfrey's hand by a
boy as he went out after dinner for a walk. It was unsigned, and ran as
follows:--

"Dear Godfrey Bullen, my cousin is in a great state of distress. She was
deceived by a third person, and in turn deceived you. She has heard
since that the story was an entire fiction to enable a gentleman for
whom the police were in search to escape. She only heard last night of
your arrest and release, and is in the greatest grief that she should
have been the innocent means of this trouble coming upon you. You know
how things are here, and she is overwhelmed with gratitude that you did
not in defence give any particulars that might have enabled them to
trace her, for she would have found it much more difficult than a
stranger would have done to have proved her innocence. She knows that
you did say nothing, for had you done so she would have been arrested
before morning; not improbably we