gray form and disappear an instant. Then, there it comes
again, and with it a gleam of steel. With one shriek of warning and
terror she springs towards them,--just in time. Hayne glances up,
catches the lifted wrist, hurls his whole weight upon the tottering
figure, and over goes the Knickerbocker prone upon the floor. Hayne
turns one instant: "Go in-doors, Mrs. Rayner. This is no place for you.
Leave him to me."

And in that instant, before either can prevent, Steven Van Antwerp,
_alias_ Gower, springs to his feet, leaps over the balcony rail, and
disappears in the depths below. It is a descent of not more than ten
feet to the sands beyond the dark passage that underlies the piazza, but
he has gone down into the passage itself. When Mr. Hayne, running down
the steps, gains his way to the space beneath the piazza, no trace of
the fugitive can he find.

* * * * *

Nor does Mr. Van Antwerp appear at breakfast on the following morning,
nor again to any person known to this story. An officer of the ----th
Cavalry, spending a portion of the following winter in Paris, writes
that he met him face to face one day in the galleries of the Louvre.
Being in civilian costume, of course, and much changed in appearance
since he was a youth in the straps of a second lieutenant, it was
possible for him to take a good long look at the man he had not seen
since he wore the chevrons of a dashing sergeant in the Battle Butte
campaign. "He has grown almost white," wrote the lieutenant, "and I'm
told he has abandoned his business in New York and never will return to
the United States."

Rayner, too, has grown gray. A telegram from his wife summoned him to
the sea-side from Washington the day after this strange adventure of
hers. He found her somewhat prostrate, his sister-in-law very pale and
quiet, and the clerks of the hotel unable to account for the
disappearance of Mr. Van Antwerp. Lieutenant Hayne, they said, had told
them he received news which compelled him to go back to New York at
once; but the gentleman's traps were all in his room. Mr. Hayne, too,
had gone to New York; and thither the captain followed. A letter came to
him at the Westminster which he read and handed in silence to Hayne. It
was as follows:

"By the time this reaches you I shall be beyond reach of the law and on
my way to Europe to spend what may be left of my days. I hope they may
be few; for the punishment that has fallen upon m