culiar! Miss Grayle, I haven't any right to ask you
questions. But I shouldn't be a man if I weren't forgetting my own
affairs--in--in curiosity, if you want to call it that (I don't!), about
yours. No! I won't let it pass for ordinary curiosity. Can't you
understand you're doing for me more than any woman ever has done, or any
man would do? That does make a bond between us. You can't deny it. Tell
me about this Mr. Smith whom you don't know and never saw, yet came to
the Savoy Hotel to meet."

CHAPTER III

WHY SHE CAME

Surprised by the abruptness of his question, Annesley's eyes dropped
from the eyes of her host, which tried to hold them. She felt that she
ought to be angry with him for taking advantage of her generosity--for
it amounted to that! Yet anger would not come, only shame and the desire
to hide a thing which would change his gratitude to contempt.

"Don't let's waste time talking about me," she said. "We haven't
arranged----"

"We've arranged everything as well as we can. For the rest, I must trust
to luck--and you. Do tell me why you came here, why you _thought_ you
came here, I mean; for I'm convinced you were sent for my sake by any
higher powers there may be. I felt that, the minute I saw you. I feel it
ten times more strongly now. I know that whatever your reason was, it's
nothing to be ashamed of."

"I _am_ ashamed," Annesley was led on to confess. "You'd despise me if I
told you, for you can't realize what my life's been for five years. And
that's my one excuse."

"Only a fool would want a woman like you to excuse herself for
anything. I swear I wouldn't despise you. I couldn't. If you should tell
me--knowing you as little, or as well, as I do, that you'd been plotting
a murder, I'd be certain you were justified, and my first thought would
be to save you, as you're saving me now."

Annesley felt again the man's intense magnetism. Suddenly she wanted to
tell him everything. It would be a relief. She would watch his face and
see how it changed. It would be like having the verdict of the world on
what she had done--or meant to do.

"I saw an advertisement in the _Morning Post_," she said with a kind of
breathless violence, "from a man who--who wanted to meet a girl with--a
'view to marriage.'"

The words brought a blush so painful that the mounting blood forced tears
to her eyes. But she looked her _vis-a-vis_ unwaveringly in the face.

That did not change at all, unless the intere