in
all her futile, charming life had been borne snugly in safe crafts that
were steered by others.

Remained but to choose her confidant. Nature suggested Terence. But it
was against Terence in particular that she had been warned. Circumstance
now offered Sylvia Armytage. But pride, or vanity if you prefer it,
denied her here. Sylvia was an inexperienced young girl, as she herself
had so often found occasion to remind her cousin. Moreover, she fostered
the fond illusion that Sylvia looked to her for precept, that upon
Sylvia's life she exercised a precious guiding influence. How, then,
should the supporting lean upon the supported? Yet since she must, there
and then, lean upon something or succumb instantly and completely, she
chose a middle course, a sort of temporary assistance.

"I have been imagining things," she said. "It may be a premonition, I
don't know. Do you believe in premonitions, Sylvia?"

"Sometimes," Sylvia humoured her.

"I have been imagining that if Dick is hiding, a fugitive, he might
naturally come to me for help. I am fanciful, perhaps," she added
hastily, lest she should have said too much. "But there it is. All day
the notion has clung to me, and I have been asking myself desperately
what I should do in such a case."

"Time enough to consider it when it happens, Una. After all--"

"I know," her ladyship interrupted on that ever-ready note of petulance
of hers. "I know, of course. But I think I should be easier in my mind
if I could find an answer to my doubt. If I knew what to do, to whom to
appeal for assistance, for I am afraid that I should be very helpless
myself. There is Terence, of course. But I am a little afraid of
Terence. He has got Dick out of so many scrapes, and he is so impatient
of poor Dick. I am afraid he doesn't understand him, and so I should be
a little frightened of appealing to Terence again."

"No," said Sylvia gravely, "I shouldn't go to Terence. Indeed he is the
last man to whom I should go."

"You say that too!" exclaimed her ladyship.

"Why?" quoth Sylvia sharply. "Who else has said it?"

There was a brief pause in which Lady O'Moy shuddered. She had been so
near to betraying herself. How very quick and shrewd Sylvia was! She
made, however, a good recovery.

"Myself, of course. It is what I have thought myself. There is Count
Samoval. He promised that if ever any such thing happened he would help
me. And he assured me I could count upon him. I think it may