pon her as to suggest, to any maiden practised in the
game of the eyes, a present significance in the words, the idea of any
such arriere-pensee had by no means commended itself to her soul.

At this time a messenger from Markton barracks arrived at the castle and
wished to speak to Captain De Stancy in the hall. Begging the two ladies
to excuse him for a moment, he went out.

While De Stancy was talking in the twilight to the messenger at one end
of the apartment, some other arrival was shown in by the side door, and
in making his way after the conference across the hall to the room he
had previously quitted, De Stancy encountered the new-comer. There was
just enough light to reveal the countenance to be Dare's; he bore a
portfolio under his arm, and had begun to wear a moustache, in case the
chief constable should meet him anywhere in his rambles, and be struck
by his resemblance to the man in the studio.

'What the devil are you doing here?' said Captain De Stancy, in tones he
had never used before to the young man.

Dare started back in surprise, and naturally so. De Stancy, having
adopted a new system of living, and relinquished the meagre diet and
enervating waters of his past years, was rapidly recovering tone. His
voice was firmer, his cheeks were less pallid; and above all he was
authoritative towards his present companion, whose ingenuity in vamping
up a being for his ambitious experiments seemed about to be rewarded,
like Frankenstein's, by his discomfiture at the hands of his own
creature.

'What the devil are you doing here, I say?' repeated De Stancy.

'You can talk to me like that, after my working so hard to get you on in
life, and make a rising man of you!' expostulated Dare, as one who felt
himself no longer the leader in this enterprise.

'But,' said the captain less harshly, 'if you let them discover any
relations between us here, you will ruin the fairest prospects man ever
had!'

'O, I like that, captain--when you owe all of it to me!'

'That's too cool, Will.'

'No; what I say is true. However, let that go. So now you are here on a
call; but how are you going to get here often enough to win her before
the other man comes back? If you don't see her every day--twice, three
times a day--you will not capture her in the time.'

'I must think of that,' said De Stancy.

'There is only one way of being constantly here: you must come to copy
the pictures or furniture, something in the way he