elf to forward her own private ends that causes my present
perplexity. Hundreds of girls take fancies for disguising themselves;
and hundreds of instances of it are related year after year in the
public journals. But my ex-pupil is not to be confounded for one moment
with the average adventuress of the newspapers. She is capable of
going a long way beyond the limit of dressing herself like a man, and
imitating a man's voice and manner. She has a natural gift for assuming
characters which I have never seen equaled by a woman; and she has
performed in public until she has felt her own power, and trained her
talent for disguising herself to the highest pitch. A girl who takes the
sharpest people unawares by using such a capacity as this to help
her own objects in private life, and who sharpens that capacity by a
determination to fight her way to her own purpose, which has beaten down
everything before it, up to this time--is a girl who tries an experiment
in deception, new enough and dangerous enough to lead, one way or the
other, to very serious results. This is my conviction, founded on a
large experience in the art of imposing on my fellow-creatures. I say of
my fair relative's enterprise what I never said or thought of it till I
introduced myself to the inside of her box. The chances for and against
her winning the fight for her lost fortune are now so evenly balanced
that I cannot for the life of me see on which side the scale inclines.
All I can discern is, that it will, to a dead certainty, turn one way or
the other on the day when she passes Noel Vanstone's doors in disguise.

Which way do my interests point now? Upon my honor, I don't know.

_Five o'clock._--I have effected a masterly compromise; I have decided
on turning myself into a Jack-o n-both-sides.

By to-day's post I have dispatched to London an anonymous letter for M
r. Noel Vanstone. It will be forwarded to its destination by the same
means which I successfully adopted to mystify Mr. Pendril; and it will
reach Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth, by the afternoon of to-morrow at the
latest.

The letter is short, and to the purpose. It warns Mr. Noel Vanstone, in
the most alarming language, that he is destined to become the victim
of a conspiracy; and that the prime mover of it is a young lady who
has already held written communication with his father and himself.
It offers him the information necessary to secure his own safety, on
condition that he makes it wor