--"

"Mr. Meredith is not in prison," said Glover quietly. "He was released
two days ago to go to a nursing home for a slight operation. He escaped
from the nursing home last night and at this particular moment is in
this house."

She could only stare at him open-mouthed, and he went on.

"The Briggerlands know he has escaped; they probably thought he was
here, because we have had a police visitation this afternoon, and the
interior of the house and grounds have been searched. They know, of
course, that Mr. Rennett and I were his legal advisers, and we expected
them to come. How he escaped their observation is neither here nor
there. Now, Miss Beale, what do you say?"

"I don't know what to say," she said, shaking her head helplessly. "I
know I'm dreaming, and if I had the moral courage to pinch myself hard,
I should wake up. Somehow I don't want to wake, it is so fascinatingly
impossible."

He smiled.

"Can I see Mr. Meredith?"

"Not till to-morrow. I might say that we've made every arrangement for
your wedding, the licence has been secured and at eight o'clock
to-morrow morning--marriages before eight or after three are not legal
in this country, by the way--a clergyman will attend and the ceremony
will be performed."

There was a long silence.

Lydia sat on the edge of her chair, her elbows on her knees, her face in
her hands.

Glover looked down at her seriously, pityingly, cursing himself that he
was the exponent of his own grotesque scheme. Presently she looked up.

"I think I will," she said a little wearily. "And you were wrong about
the number of judgment summonses, there were seventy-five in two
years--and I'm so tired of lawyers."

"Thank you," said Jack Glover politely.

Chapter IV

All night long she had sat in the little bedroom to which Mrs. Rennett
had led her, thinking and thinking and thinking. She could not sleep,
although she had tried hard, and most of the night she spent pacing up
and down from window to door turning over the amazing situation in which
she found herself. She had never thought of marriage seriously, and
really a marriage such as this presented no terrors and might, had the
prelude been a little less exciting, been accepted by her with relief.
The prospect of being a wife in name only, even the thought that her
husband would be, for the next twenty years, behind prison walls,
neither distressed nor horrified her. Somehow she accepted Glover's
statement tha