eory of suicide, and the theory of suicide to the theory
of flight; how a porter on the pier at Blackwater said he had carried my
trunk to the steamer that sailed on Thursday midnight, thinking I was a
maid from the great house until I had given him half-a-crown (his proper
fee being threepence); how two female passengers had declared that a
person answering to my description had sailed with them to Liverpool;
how these clues had been followed up and had led to nothing; and how,
finally, the correspondents had concluded the whole incident of my
disappearance could not be more mysterious if I had been dropped from
mid-air into the middle of the Irish Sea.

But then came another development.

My father, who was reported to have received the news of my departure in
a way that suggested he had lost control of his senses (raging and
storming at my husband like a man demented), having come to the
conclusion that I, being in a physical condition peculiar to women, had
received a serious shock resulting in a loss of memory, offered five
hundred pounds reward for information that would lead to my discovery,
which was not only desirable to allay the distress of my heart-broken
family but urgently necessary to settle important questions of title and
inheritance.

With this offer of a reward came a description of my personal
appearance.

_"Age 20, a little under medium height; slight; very black hair;
lustrous dark eyes; regular features; pale face; grave expression;
unusually sunny smile."_

It would be impossible for me to say with what perturbation I heard
these reports read out by the old colonel and the old clergyman. Even
the nervous stirring of my spoon and the agitated clatter of my knife
and fork made me wonder that my house-mates did not realise the truth,
which must I thought, be plainly evident to all eyes.

They never did, being so utterly immersed in their own theories. But all
the same I sometimes felt as if my fellow guests in that dingy house in
Bloomsbury were my judges and jury, and more than once, in my great
agitation, when the reports came near to the truth, I wanted to cry.
"Stop, stop, don't you see it is I?"

That I never did so was due to the fact that, not knowing what legal
powers my father might have to compel my return to Ellan, the terror
that sat on me like a nightmare was that of being made the subject of a
public quarrel between my father and my husband, concerning the
legitimacy of my unb