ries as I have, I shall
strangle. To-day I commence a new life."

She sighed.

"One's past" she said, "is not always so easily to be disposed of.
There are ghosts which will haunt us, and sometimes the ghosts are
living figures."

"Let them come to me," he murmured, "and my fingers shall be upon their
throats. I want no such legacies."

She shook her head slowly.

"Ghosts" she said, with a faint smile, "are sometimes very difficult
people to deal with."

CHAPTER IV

EXIT MR. DOUGLAS GUEST

Through the heart of England the express tore on--through town and
country, underneath the earth and across high bridges. All the while
the man and the woman talked. To him she was a revelation. Every
moment of his life had been spent in a humdrum seclusion--every moment
of hers seemed to have been lived out to its limit in those worlds of
which he had barely even dreamed. She was older than he had thought
her--thirty, perhaps, or thirty-one--and her speech and gestures every
now and then had a foreign flavour. She talked to him of countries
which he had scarcely dared hope to visit, and of men and women whose
names were as household words. She spoke of them with an ease and
familiarity which betokened close acquaintance--talking to him with a
mixture of kindness and reserve as if he were some strange creature who
had had the good fortune to interest her for the moment, but from whom
at any time she might draw aloof. Every word she spoke he hung upon.
He had come out into the world to seek for adventures--not, indeed, in
the spirit of the modern Don Quixote, tingling only for new sensations
to stimulate; but with the more robust and breezy spirit of his
ancestors, seeking for a fuller life and a healthy excitement, even at
the cost of hard blows and many privations. Surely this was an
auspicious start--an adventure this indeed! During a momentary silence
she looked across at him with genuine curiosity, her eyes half closed,
her brows knitted. What enthusiasm! She was not a vain woman, and she
knew that her personality had little, if anything, to do with the flush
upon his cheeks and the bright light in his eyes. She herself, a much
travelled, a learned, a brilliant, even a famous woman, had become only
lately conscious of a certain jaded weariness in her outlook upon life.
Even the best had begun to pall, the sameness of it had commenced its
fatal work. More than once lately a touch of that heart languor, which
is the