st the
open door of the vacant library, and out into the grounds. She met
no one, and when at last she paused in the dense shadows of some
thick shrubbery, she had the satisfaction of feeling that she had
been unobserved. Here, too, she was quite secluded, and in the effort
to collect herself she sat down on the grass, her knees drawn up, her
forehead resting on them, her clasped hands strained about them.

How long she remained so, while her leaping heart grew gradually
calmer, she did not know.

A sound aroused her from her lethargy. It was the clear whistle of
some one calling a dog. She knew who it was before a voice said,

"Here, Comrade--come to me, sir."

The voice was not far off, but the shrubbery was between it and her.
She would have felt safe but for the dog. She did not move a muscle.

The footsteps were drawing near her, and now bounding leaps of a
dog could be heard also. Both passed, and she began to breathe
more freely, when what she had dreaded came. The dog, stopping his
gambols, began to sniff about him. The next moment he had bounded
through the shrubbery and was yelping gleefully at her side.

Instantly she sprang to her feet and stood there, slight and tall and
straight in her long black wrap, the image of pallid woe. All the
blood had left her face, and her eyes were wide and terrified.

It was so that she appeared to the man who, parting the branches of
the thick foliage, stood silent and surprised before her. She might
have been the very spirit of widowhood, so desolate she looked.

Raising his hat automatically, he said, in a strained, unnatural
voice, "Can I do anything for you?"

She tried to speak, but speech eluded her.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but can I do anything for you, Lady
Hurdly?"

Oh, that name! She had had an instinct to free herself at last from
the burden she had borne, and to tell him, in answer to his question,
that he could do this for her--he could hear her tell of the wretched
treachery by which she had been led to do him such a wrong, and of
the misery of its consequences in her life. But the utterance of that
name recalled her to herself. It reminded her not only who she was,
but also who and by what means he was also.

[Illustration: "THE VERY SPIRIT OF WIDOWHOOD"]

"Leave me," she said, throwing out her hand with a repellent gesture.
"I have gone through much, and I am not strong. If you have any
mercy, any kindness, leave me to myself. It is not