hat she was your sister?"
Mrs. Gardner demanded.

Tavernake threw open the door before which they had been standing.

"This," he said, "is the famous dancing gallery. Lord Clumber is quite
willing to allow the pictures to remain, and I may tell you that they
are insured for over sixty thousand pounds. There is no finer dancing
room than this in all London."

Her eyes swept around it carelessly.

"I have no doubt," she admitted coldly, "that it is very beautiful. I
prefer to continue our discussion."

"The dining-room," he went on, "is almost as large. Lord Clumber tells
us that he has frequently entertained eighty guests for dinner. The
system of ventilation in this room is, as you see, entirely modern."

She took him by the arm and led him to a seat at the further end of the
apartment.

"Mr. Tavernake," she said, making an obvious attempt to control her
temper, "you seem like a very sensible young man, if you will allow me
to say so, and I want to convince you that it is your duty to answer
my questions. In the first place--don't be offended, will you?--but I
cannot possibly see what interest you and that young lady can have
in one another. You belong, to put it baldly, to altogether different
social stations, and it is not easy to imagine what you could have in
common."

She paused, but Tavernake had nothing to say. His gift of silence
amounted sometimes almost to genius. She leaned so close to him while
she waited in vain for his reply, that the ermine about her neck brushed
his cheek. The perfume of her clothes and hair, the pleading of her deep
violet-blue eyes, all helped to keep him tongue-tied. Nothing of this
sort had ever happened to him before. He did not in the least understand
what it could possibly mean.

"I am speaking to you now, Mr. Tavernake," she continued earnestly, "for
your own good. When you tell the young lady, as you have promised to
this evening, that you have seen me, and that I am very, very anxious to
find out where she is, she will very likely go down on her knees and beg
you to give me no information whatever about her. She will do her best
to make you promise to keep us apart. And yet that is all because she
does not understand. Believe me, it is better that you should tell me
the truth. You cannot know her very well, Mr. Tavernake, but she is
not very wise, that young lady. She is very obstinate, and she has some
strange ideas. It is not well for her that she should be left in