g back from me?"

"Everything depends on Don Carlos--and Cojuelo," Myra responded,
evading the question. "Please say nothing to him, aunt, until I have
spoken to him alone."

"Oh, the whole affair seems a crazy nightmare, and I don't know what to
make of it all," said her aunt, with another sigh. "I wish we had
never come to this wretched, lawless place. You must have had a
premonition of trouble when you at first refused Don Carlos's
invitation for no particular reason. Myra, my dear, I am sorry for
you!"

Her feelings got the better of her, and with tears in her eyes she
flung her arms around Myra and hugged her close to her breast. And
Myra suddenly broke down, buried her face in her aunt's shoulder, and
cried like a hurt child.

"Better go to bed, dear," said Lady Fermanagh recovering herself after
a few minutes. "We are all suffering from the strain and are not
normal.... Go to bed, Myra, and try to make up your mind to go back to
England with Tony to-morrow...."

CHAPTER XIX

Myra went to bed, but it was a long time before she could compose
herself to woo sleep, so full was her mind of disturbing thoughts, so
many problems did she find herself called on to solve.

"Does he love me?" That was the question that she put to herself time
and again, and could not answer. "Do I love him?" was another. And at
heart she knew that if she were certain that the answer to the first
question was in the affirmative, she could answer the second in a like
manner.

"What will it profit me if I denounce him?" she soliloquised. "He says
he is at my mercy, but he can claim me, and boast that I offered to
marry him, even if I do revenge myself by denouncing him. Always he
seems to have the advantage of me. To save my 'honour' now, and
satisfy Aunt Clarissa, I shall either have to humble myself to ask him
to marry me publicly, or else forgive Tony. Either course is
repugnant."

She fell asleep at last, but was wrestling with her problem even in her
jumbled dreams. She woke with a start, and with the impression strong
upon her that someone or something had touched her face and her breast.
Scared, she groped for the electric switch and flashed on the light
above the bed, and as she did so she remembered having awakened months
previously at Auchinleven just in the same sort of fright, to find Don
Carlos's note on her pillow.

Some odd instinct or intuition told her that history had repeated
itself, and i