h louder than he was
aware.

"Yes; you may well wonder, if you don't know about it, that I should
have asked a gentleman from a public-house to meet you. But you will be
quite in love with him; he is such a very good young man. Not handsome,
nor very amusing; but people think a great deal too much of amusingness
now. He is very, very good, and spends almost all his time among the
poor. He is a Fellow of his College at Oxford."

During this discourse Mr. Cranley was pretending to play with the
terrier; but, stoop as he might, his face was livid, and he knew it.

"Did I tell you his name?" Mrs. St. John Deloraine ran on. "He is a--"

Here the door was opened, and the servant announced "Mr. Maitland."

When Mrs. St. John Deloraine had welcomed her new guest, she turned, and
found that Mr. Cranley was looking out of the window.

His position was indeed agonizing, and, in the circumstances, a stronger
heart might have blanched at the encounter.

When Cranley last met Maitland, he had been the guest of that
philanthropist, and he had gone from his table to swindle his
fellow-revellers. What other things he had done--things in which
Maitland was concerned--the reader knows, or at least suspects. But it
was not these deeds which troubled Mr. Cranley, for these he knew were
undetected. It was that affair of the baccarat which unmanned him.

There was nothing for it but to face Maitland and the situation.

"Let me introduce you--" said Mrs. St. John Deloraine.

"There is no need," interrupted Maitland. "Mr. Cranley and I have known
each other for some time. I don't think we have met," he added, looking
at Cranley, "since you dined with me at the Olympic, and we are not
likely to meet again, I'm afraid; for to-morrow, as I have come to tell
Mrs. Si John Deloraine, I go to Paris on business of importance."

Mr. Cranley breathed again; it was obvious that Maitland, living out of
the world as he did, and concerned (as Cranley well knew him to be)
with private affairs of an urgent character, had never been told of the
trouble at the Cockpit, or had, in his absent fashion, never attended
to what he might have heard with the hearing of the ear. As to Paris, he
had the best reason for guessing why Maitland was bound thither, as he
was the secret source of the information on which Maitland proposed to
act.

At luncheon--which, like the dinner described by the American guest,
was "luscious and abundant"--Mr. Cranley was more s