the doctor. So the
afternoon train bore Lucian Davlin away from the city and his victim,
to seek repose and diversion in the society of his comrade, Cora.

"She will come out of this now, I think," he muttered. "Then--Oh! I'll
tame your proud spirit yet, my lady! I would not give you up now for
half a million."

And he meant it.

CHAPTER VIII.

THREADS OF THE FABRIC.

What had become of Madeline Payne?

The question went the round of the village, as such questions do. The
servants of Oakley fed upon it. They held secret conferences in the
kitchen, and grew loud and argumentative when they knew John Arthur
was safely out of hearing. They bore themselves with an air of
subdued, unobservant melancholy in his presence, and waxed important,
mysterious and unsatisfactory, when in converse with the towns
folk--as was quite right and proper, for were they not, in the eyes of
mystery hunters, objects of curiosity secondary only to their master
himself?

The somber-faced old housekeeper gave utterance to a doleful croak or
two, and a more doleful prophecy. But after a summons from John
Arthur, and a brief interview with him in the closely shut sacredness
of his especial den, not even the social intercourse of the kitchen
and the inspiration that the prolonged absence of the master always
lent to things below stairs, could beguile from her anything beyond
the terse statement that "she didn't meddle with her master's
affairs," and she "s'posed Miss Madeline knew where she was."

The housemaid, who read novels and was rather fond of Miss Payne,
grieved for a very little while, but found in this "visitation of
providence," as John Arthur piously termed it, food for romance
weaving on her own responsibility. She entertained Peter, the groom,
coachman and general factotum, with divers suggestions and
suppositions, each more soul harrowing than the last, making of poor
Madeline a lay figure upon which she fitted all the catastrophes that
had ever befallen her yellow-covered "heroinesses."

The villagers talked. It was all they could do, and their tongues were
very busy for a time until, in fact, a fresher sensation arrived.
Nurse Hagar was viewed and interviewed; but beyond sincere expression
of grief at her disappearance, and the unvarying statement that she
had not even the slightest conjecture as to the fate of the lost girl,
nothing could be gained from her.

Hagar was somewhat given to rather bluntly spoken op