k?" Then, seeing that Gowan had heard her, she looked at him
piteously.

"I did not mean to speak aloud," she said. "I had forgotten in my
trouble that Grif will be waiting for me all this time. He has gone to
the house to meet me, and--I am not there."

Perhaps he felt a slight pang, too. For some time he had been slowly
awakening, to the fact that this otherwise unfortunate Grif was all in
all to her, and shut out the rest of the world completely. He had no
chance against him, and no other man would have any. Still, even in the
face of this knowledge, the evident keenness of her disappointment cut
him a little.

"You must not let that trouble you," he said, generously. "Donne will
easily understand your absence when you tell him where you have been.
In the meantime, I have a few suggestions to make before we reach the
hotel."

It was Mollie he was thinking of. He was wondrously tender of her in
his man's pity for her childish folly and simplicity. If possible,
they must keep her secret to themselves. If she had left no explanation
behind her, she must have given some reason for leaving the house, and
if they found her at the hotel it would not be a difficult matter to
carry her back home without exciting suspicion, and thus she would be
saved the embarrassment and comment her position would otherwise call
down upon her. Griffith might be told in confidence, but the rest of
them might be left to imagine that nothing remarkable had occurred.
These were his suggestions.

Dolly agreed to adopt them at once, it is hardly necessary to say. The
idea that it would be possible to adopt them made the case look less
formidable. She had been terribly troubled at first by the thought of
the excitement the explanation of the escapade would cause at Bloomsbury
Place. Phil would have been simply furious,--not so much against Mollie
as against Chandos. His good-natured indifference to circumstances would
not have been proof against the base betrayal of confidence involved in
the affair. And then even in the after-time, when the worst was over and
forgotten, the innumerable jokes and thoughtless sarcasms she would have
had to encounter would have been Mollie's severest punishment. When the
remembrance of her past danger had faded out of the family mind, and the
whimsical side of the matter presented itself, they would have teased
her, and Dolly felt that such a course would be far from safe. So she
caught at Ralph Gowan's plan ea