r words now
might have for him in a day or two. She was daintily rearranging the
violets in his buttonhole, and he caught the slender white hands in
his, and, lifting them to his lips, kissed them with a passionate
humility. A little while, perhaps, and those dear hands would never
again thrill warm in his grasp as he felt them now!

'I'm afraid,' said Mabel a little later, 'you're letting yourself be
worried still by something. Is it the new book? Are you getting
impatient to hear about it?'

'I did expect some letters before this,' replied Mark (he was indeed
fast growing desperate at Caffyn's silence); 'but I dare say
everything is going on well.'

'The train from Basle came in just as we got here,' said Mabel. 'See,
there is the postman crossing the bridge now; I'm getting anxious too,
Mark, I can't think why I have had no letters from home lately. I hope
it is nothing to do with Dolly. She was looking quite ill when we went
away, almost as she did--oh, Mark, if I thought Harold had dared to
frighten her again!'

Mark remembered that afternoon in South Audley Street. He had never
sought to know why Dolly had gone away so obediently, but now he felt
a new uneasiness; he had never meant her to be frightened; he would
see into it if he ever came home again.

'I don't think he would do such a thing now,' he said, and tried to
believe so himself. 'I always thought, you know, Mabel, you were
rather hard on him about that affair.'

'I can never change my mind about it,' said Mabel.

'When you are angry, do you never forgive?' asked Mark.

'I could never forgive treachery,' she said. 'Dolly believed every
word he said, and he knew it and played on her trust in him for some
horrible pleasure I suppose he found in it. No, I can never forgive
him for that, Mark, never!'

He turned away with a spasm of conscience. If Caffyn had been a
traitor, what was he?

He was roused from a gloomy reverie by Mabel's light touch on his arm.
'Look, Mark,' she cried, 'there is something you wanted to
see--there's a timber raft coming down the river.'

For within the last few days the Rhine had risen sufficiently to make
it possible to send the timber down the stream, instead of by the long
and costly transport overland, and as she spoke the compact mass of
pine trunks lashed together came slowly round the bend of the river,
gradually increasing in pace until it shot the arch of the bridge and
plunged through the boiling white ra