uld do was to nod a hasty
assent to her request.

"Then I must make haste," he said, and ran quickly upstairs in the wake
of the other guest.

The staircase at Shadonake was very wide and very handsome, and
thoroughly in keeping with the spacious character of the house. It
consisted of one wide flight of shallow steps, with a richly-carved
balustrade on either side of it, leading straight down from a large
square landing above. Both landing and steps were carpeted with thick
velvet-pile carpet, so that no jarring footfall was ever heard upon them.
The hall into which the staircase led was paved in coloured mosaic tiles,
and was half covered over with rich Persian rugs. A great many doors,
nearly all the sitting-rooms of the house, in fact, opened into it,
and the blank spaces of the wall were filled in with banks of large
handsome plants, palms and giant ferns, and azaleas in full bloom, which
were daily rearranged by the gardeners in every available corner.

At the foot of the staircase, and with his back to it, leaning against
the balustrade, stood Captain Kynaston, exactly four minutes before the
dinner was announced.

Most people were in the habit of calling Maurice a good-looking man, but
if anybody had seen him now for the first time it is doubtful whether
they would have endorsed that favourable opinion upon his personal
appearance. A thoroughly ill-tempered expression of face seldom enhances
any one's good looks, and if ever a man looked in a bad temper, Maurice
Kynaston did so at the present moment.

He stood with his hands in his trousers pockets, and his eyes fixed upon
his own boots, and he looked as savage as it was well possible for a man
to look.

He was waiting here for Helen, because he had told her that he would do
so, and when Captain Kynaston promised anything to a lady he always kept
his word.

But to say that he hated being there is but a mild term for the rage and
disgust he experienced.

To be waylaid and attacked thus, directly he had set foot in the house,
with a stranger and three servants looking on so as to render him
absolutely helpless; to be uncomfortably hurried over his toilet, and
inveigled into a sort of rendezvous at the foot of a public staircase,
where a number of people might at any minute enter from any one of the
six or eight surrounding doors, was enough of itself to try his temper;
but when he came to consider how Helen, in thus appropriating him and
making him obey