ring very thin. Only those two loyal
souls, Honoria Fraser and Albert Adams, were cognizant of the
secret, but it was being guessed at and almost guessed right, in
certain quarters. Professional jealousy was on my track. I never
fainted before in my life--so far as I can remember--but I might
have done so elsewhere than in your dear house, after the strain of
such an effort as I made to save that worthless woman--she was your
cousin, which is why I fought for her so hard--How often is not
justice deflected by Love! I might, somewhere else, when
over-strained have had a fit of hysterics; and my disguise would
have been penetrated by eyes less merciful than yours. Then would
have come exposure and its consequences--damaging to You (_I_ should
not have mattered), to my poor old 'father' down in Wales--whom I
sincerely love--to Praddy, to Honoria....

"Let me be thankful to get off so easily! _Somme toute_, I have had
a glorious time, have seen the world from the man's point of
view--and I can assure you that from his point of view it is a jolly
place to live in--_He_ can walk up and down the Strand and receive
no insult.

"Well now, to relieve your anxieties, I will tell you, that after a
brief visit to South Wales to recuperate from the exertions of that
trial, Mr. David Williams the famous young barrister at the Criminal
Bar will go abroad to investigate the White Slave Traffic. Miss
Vivien Warren privately believes--and hopes--that the horrors of
this traffic in British womanhood are greatly exaggerated. The lot
in life of many of these young women is so bad in their native land
that they cannot make it worse by going abroad, no matter in what
avowed career. But Mr. David Williams takes rather a higher line and
is resolved in any case to get at the Truth. Miss Warren, nathless,
has her misgivings anent her old mamma, and would like to know what
that old lady is doing at the present time, and whether she is past
reform. Miss Warren even has her moments of doubt as to the
flawless perfection of her own life: whether the path of duty in
1897 did not rather lie in the direction of a serious attempt to be
a daughter to her wayward mother and reclaim her then, instead of
going off at a tangent as the mannish type of New Woman, to whom
applicable Mathematics are everything and human affections very
little. I suppose the truth, the commonplace truth is, that rather
late in life, Vivien Warren has fallen in love in the old-fa