may be.
We've done jolly well out of that last affair!"

"Yes," his wife agreed. "The only thing I don't like about it is the
_mystery_. It makes me feel as if something might be hanging over one's
head."

"Over the trustees' heads!" laughed Lord Annesley-Seton. "I wish the
other night could be what the Countess called the 'first of a series.'"

"The first of a series!" Constance repeated. "What a queer expression!
What was she talking about?"

"She was--looking in her crystal," answered Dick, slowly, as if something
he had seen rose again before his eyes.

Constance was pricked with curiosity. "You might tell me what the woman
said!" she exclaimed.

"You haven't told me what message she had for you."

"I've just said that she prophesied we should be robbed again."

"That's only one thing. What about the rest?"

"Oh! A lot of stuff which wouldn't interest _you_!"

"You can keep your secret. And I'll keep mine," remarked Dick
Annesley-Seton, aggravatingly. "Anyhow, for the present. We'll see how it
works out."

"See how _what_ works out?" his wife echoed.

"The series."

CHAPTER XIII

THE SERIES GOES ON

After all, Annesley had not written to her friends, Archdeacon Smith and
his wife, on leaving Mrs. Ellsworth's, to tell the surprising news of her
engagement. She had asked Mr. Ruthven Smith not to speak of it to his
cousins, because she would prefer to write. But then--the putting of the
news on paper in a way not to offend them, after their kindness in the
past, had been difficult.

Besides, there had been little time to think out the difficulties, and
find a way of surmounting them. There had been only one whole day before
the wedding, and that day she had spent with Knight, buying her
trousseau. It had been a wonderful day, never to be forgotten, but its
end had found her tired; and when Knight had said "good-bye" and left
her, she had not been equal to composing a letter.

Nevertheless, she had tried, for it had seemed dreadful to marry and go
away from London without letting her only friends know what had happened,
what she was doing, and why she had not invited them to her wedding.

Ah, _why_? In explaining that she confronted the great obstacle. She
had not known how to exonerate herself without hurting their feelings,
or--telling a lie.

The girl hated lying. She could not remember that in her life she had
ever spoken or written a lie in so many words, though, like most people
w