r portmanteau in the back room just now,
Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't hear any one go
upstairs."

"I didn't bring one, aunt," said Julian.

"Not bring--"

"I was forgetting to tell ye. I can't sleep here to-night. I'm off to
South Africa to-morrow, and I've got a lot of things to fix up at my
digs to-night." He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis passed to
him.

"To South Africa?" murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast. And she repeated,
"South Africa?" To her it was an incredible distance. It was not
a place--it was something on the map. Perhaps she had never
imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South
Africa. "But this is the first I have heard of this!" she said.
Julian's extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.

"I only got the telegram about my berth this morning," said Julian,
rather sullenly on the defensive.

"Is it business?" Mrs. Maldon asked.

"You may depend it isn't pleasure, aunt," he answered, and shut his
lips tight on the pipe.

After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.

"Where do you sail from?"

Julian answered--

"Southampton."

There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of
sympathetic dismay at the situation.

Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.

"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I
can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house
to-night--with all these burglars about--weren't we, Rachel?" Her
grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.

Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more
brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile--

"We were, indeed!"

But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a
girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the
brute Julian.

"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the
situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.

"Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-knobs at the Cape, I
suppose?" said Louis quizzically. His cousin manufactured, among other
articles, white and jet door-knobs.

"No need for you to be so desperately funny!" snapped Julian, who
detested Louis' brand of facetiousness. It was the word "propitious"
that somehow annoyed him--it had a sarcastic flavour, and it was
"Louis all over."

"No offence, old man!" Louis magnanimously soothed him. "On the
contrary, many happy returns of the day." In social intercour