her alarm was lessened somewhat by
the sound of a soft, well-modulated voice.

"Who's that?" it said faintly.

Then followed the repeated scratching of a wet match, a flame of yellow
light, which was immediately carried to a short tallow candle, and in
the aura of its sickly flame Stella Donovan saw the face of a man with
long, unkempt beard and feverish eyes that stared at her as though she
were an apparition.

CHAPTER XXVI: THE REAPPEARANCE OF CAVENDISH

As her eyes became more accustomed to the light she saw that the
stranger was a man of approximately thirty, of good robust health. His
hair was sandy of colour and thin, and his beard, which was of the same
hue, had evidently gone untrimmed for days, perhaps weeks; yet for all
of his unkempt appearance, for all the strangeness of his presence
there, he was a gentleman, that was plain. And as she scrutinised him
Miss Donovan thought she beheld a mild similarity in the contour of the
man's head, the shape of his face, the lines of his body, to the man
whom, several weeks before, she had seen lying dead upon the floor of
his rooms in the Waldron apartments.

Could this be Frederick Cavendish? By all that had gone before, he
should be; but the longer she looked at him the less certain she was of
the correctness of this surmise. Of course the face of the man in the
Waldron apartments had been singed by fire so that it was virtually
unrecognisable, thus making comparisons in the present instance
difficult. At any rate, she dismissed the speculation temporarily from
her mind, and resolved to divulge nothing for the time, but merely to
draw the man out. Her thoughts, rapid as they had been, were
interrupted by the fellow's sudden exclamation.

"My God!" he cried in a high voice, "I--I thought I was seeing things.
You are really a woman--and alive?"

Miss Donovan hesitated a moment before she answered, wondering whether
to tell him of her narrow escape. This she decided to do.

"Alive, but only by luck," she said in a friendly voice, and then
recounted the insults of Cateras, her struggle with him, and capture of
his cartridge belt and revolver, and how finally she had left him bound
and gagged in the adjoining cell. The man listened attentively, though
his mind seemed slow to grasp details.

"But," he insisted, unable to clear his brain, "why are you here?
Surely you are not one of this gang of outlaws?"

"I am inclined to think," she answered sober