sank into a long and glowing twilight. The hills
stood in purple against a tawny west, and the smoke from the little town
in the valley rose clear and blue into air already autumnal. The guests
of Franick had scattered in twos and threes over the gardens and the
moor, while Doris, her host and hostess, and the solicitor, sat and
waited for Alice Wigram. She came with the evening train, tired, dusty,
and triumphant; and the information she brought with her was more than
enough to go upon. The past of Elena Flink--poor lady!--shone luridly
out; and even the countenance of the solicitor cleared. As for Lord
Dunstable, he grasped the girl by both hands.

"My dear child, what you have done for us! Ah, if your father were
here!"

And bending over her, with the courtly grace of an old man, he kissed
her on the brow. Alice Wigram flushed, turning involuntarily towards
Lady Dunstable.

"Rachel!--don't we owe her everything," said Lord Dunstable with
emotion--"her and Mrs. Meadows? But for them, our boy might have wrecked
his life."

"He appears to have been a most extraordinary fool!" said Lady Dunstable
with energy:--a recrudescence of the natural woman, which was positively
welcome to everybody. And it did not prevent the passage of some
embarrassed but satisfactory words between Herbert Dunstable's mother
and Alice Wigram, after Lady Dunstable had taken her latest guest to
"Lady Mary's" room, bidding her go straight to bed, and be waited on.

Lord Dunstable and the lawyer departed after dinner to meet their
special train at Perth. Lady Dunstable, with variable spirits, kept the
evening going, sometimes in a brown study, sometimes as brilliant and
pugnacious as ever. Doris slipped out of the drawing-room once or twice
to go and gossip with Alice Wigram, who was lying under silken
coverings, inclined to gentle moralising on the splendours of the great,
and much petted by Miss Field and the house-keeper.

"How nice you look!" said the girl shyly, on one occasion, as Doris came
stealing in to her. "I never saw such a pretty gown!"

"Not bad!" said Doris complacently, throwing a glance at the large
mirror near. It was still the white tea-gown, for she had firmly
declined to sample anything else, in truth well aware that Arthur's
eyes approved both it and her in it.

"Lord Dunstable has been so kind," whispered Miss Wigram. "He said I
must always henceforth look upon him as a kind of guardian. Of course I
should never le