aving the sister in a
much-placated humour and regarding the girl with a far more indulgent
countenance than Sally had found any reason at first to hope for.

As for that young woman, the circumstance that she was inwardly all
a-shudder didn't in the least hinder her exercise of that feminine
trick of mentally photographing, classifying, and cataloguing the
other woman's outward aspects in detail and, at the same time,
distilling her more subtle phases of personality in the retort of
instinct and minutely analysing the precipitate.

The result laid the last lingering ghost of suspicion that all was not
as it should be between these two, that Blue Serge had not been
altogether frank with her.

She had from the first appreciated the positive likeness between Mrs.
Standish and the portrait in the library, even though her observation
of the latter had been limited to the most casual inspection through
the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for
questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman
of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class--intelligent,
neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from
exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with
every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the
fact was not apparent; she dressed with such exquisite taste as only
money can purchase, if it be not innate; she carried herself with the
ease of affluence founded upon a rock, while her nervousness was
manifestly due rather to impatience than to the vice of worrying.

"And now," Mr. Savage wound up with a graceless grin, "if you'll be
good enough to explain what the dickens you're doing here instead of
being on the way to Boston by the eleven-ten, I'll be grateful; Miss
Manvers will quit doubting my veracity--secretly, if not openly; and
we can proceed to consider something I have to suggest with
respect to the obligations of a woman who has been saved the loss of a
world of gewgaws as well as those of a man who is alive and whole
exclusively, thanks to . . . Well, I think you know what I mean."

"Oh, as for that," said Mrs. Standish absently, "when you turned up
missing on the train I stopped it at the Hundred and Twenty-Fifth
Street station and came back to find out what was the matter. I've
been all through this blessed place looking for you--"

"Pardon!" Mr. Savage interrupted. "Did I understand you to say you had
stopped the