once or twice staring at me. I try to speak to him,
but he sits and stares and stares, with his eyes so bright and all the
time so sombre--so penetrating that I feel that he sees quite through
me. Just like one does in those unpleasant dreams where one's clothes
have somehow disappeared. To-day, and now, it seems very silly, yet I am
certain I shall feel exactly the same the next time I meet him. Then
when he sees how confused I am he gives a sort of a laugh, an unpleasant
kind of a chuckle without any merriment in it."

"He's a d----d cad!" I cried hotly.

"I--I don't know," she answered. "I don't seem to mind at the time. It
is just as if I were in a dream, for I am so fascinated in watching him
that I have no thoughts left for myself. It is when he has gone that the
thought seems unpleasant. Then I always think I will never see him
again, but the next time he calls I feel bound to do so. There, now I
have confided in you, don't tell me I am a weak hysterical girl or I
really don't know what will happen to me."

She laid one of her little hands on my arm and looked imploringly into
my eyes.

"I know you are neither weak nor hysterical," I replied.

"You will help me, won't you?" she asked.

I took both hands in mine and looked straight into her eyes.

"The only way I see of helping you," I said deliberately, "is for you to
give me the right to do so."

She did not take her hands from my grasp.

* * * * *

"Do you know, Jim," she said an hour later, when we came out of the wood
into the meadow, "that I told you not to speak to me until you had
captured the Motor Pirate."

"You could not answer for me, darling," I replied. "But I should not
have done so if I----"

"Had not found the temptation to do so irresistible," she said, taking
the words out of my mouth with so bewitching an air, that again I found
an irresistible temptation confronting me.

We did not revert again to the curious influence which Evie had declared
Mannering exercised. She would not allow of it. She wanted to think that
he had gone completely out of her life, and that no more shadows were
ever to fall across her path. And I was too happy myself to wish to
refer to anything which should bring an unpleasant memory to her mind.

I shall never forget our walk home. The silver thread of the Ver, the
old monastery gate-house and the ruins of Sopwell Priory in the
foreground, the churches of St. Stephens and