en continued to stare at her helplessly. Her lips quivered; but
they uttered no sound. It was impossible to misunderstand Millicent's
object. She meant to wound and insult in the grossest way.

Bower dropped Helen's arm, and strode close to the woman who had
struck this shrewd blow at him. "I give you this one chance!" he
muttered, while his eyes blazed into hers. "Go to your room, or sit
down somewhere till I am free. I shall come to you, and put things
straight that now seem crooked. You are wrong, horribly wrong, in your
suspicions. Wait my explanation, or by all that I hold sacred, you
will regret it to your dying hour!"

Millicent drew back a little. She conveyed the suggestion that his
nearness was offensive to her nostrils. And she laughed, with due
semblance of real amusement. "What! Has she made a fool of you too?"
she cried bitingly.

Then Helen did exactly the thing she ought not to have done. She
fainted.

Spencer, in his own vivid phrase, was "looking for trouble" the
instant he caught sight of the actress. Had some Mahatma-devised magic
lantern focused on the screen of his inner consciousness a complete
narrative of the circumstances which conspired to bring Millicent
Jaques to the Upper Engadine, he could not have mastered cause and
effect more fully. The unlucky letter he asked Mackenzie to send to
the Wellington Theater--the letter devised as a probe into Bower's
motives, but which was now cruelly searching its author's heart--had
undoubtedly supplied to a slighted woman the clew to her rival's
identity. Better posted than Bower in the true history of Helen's
visit to Switzerland, he did not fail to catch the most significant
word in Millicent's scornful greeting.

"And with _both_ cavaliers!"

In all probability, she knew the whole ridiculous story, reading into
it the meaning lent by jealous spleen, and no more to be convinced of
error than the Forno glacier could be made to flow backward.

[Illustration: "No," said Spencer, "ring for the elevator."
_Page 217_]

But if his soul was vexed by a sense of bygone folly, his brain was
cool and alert. He saw Helen sway slightly. He caught her before she
collapsed where she stood. He gathered her tenderly in his arms. She
might have been a tired child, fallen asleep too soon. Her limp head
rested on his shoulder. Through the meshes of her blue veil he could
see the sudden pallor of her cheeks. The tint of the silk adde