re to serve you, and with me a few days do not matter. I shall
have enough of my own company before long."

"You live alone?" asked Helen.

"I have an old Indian for companion."

"And what do you do, if you will permit me to be so curious?"

"Oh," he laughed. "I hunt, I pursue the elusive nugget, and I
experiment with vegetables. And this winter I am going to start a
trapping line."

"But you are rich!" she cried. "You have no need to live in exile."

"Yes," he answered with sudden bitterness. "I am rich. I suppose Ainley
told you that. But exile is the only thing for me. You see a sojourn in
Dartmoor spoils one for county society."

"Oh," she cried protestingly, "I cannot believe that you--that you----"

"Thank you," he said as the girl broke off in confusion. "I cannot
believe it myself. But twelve good men and true believed it; an expert
in handwriting was most convincing, and if you had heard the judge----"

"But you did not do it, Mr. Stane, I am sure of that."

"No," he answered, "I did not do the thing for which I suffered. But to
prove my innocence is another matter."

"You have not given up the endeavour, I hope."

"No! I have a man at work in England, and I myself make small
endeavours. Only the other day I thought that I----" Apparently he
remembered something, for he broke off sharply. "But why discuss the
affair? It is only one of the world's small injustices which shows that
the law, usually right, may go wrong occasionally."

But Helen Yardely was not so easily to be turned aside. Whilst he had
been speaking a thought had occurred to her, and now took the form of a
question.

"I suppose that the other night when you were waiting for Mr. Ainley,
it was on this particular matter that you wished to see him?"

"What makes you think that?" Stane asked quickly.

Helen Yardely smiled. "It is not difficult to guess. You told me last
night that you wished to question him on a matter that was important to
you. And this matter--Well! it needs no argument."

"It might be something else, Miss Yardely," was the evasive reply.

"Yes, it might be," answered the girl, "but I do not think it is."

Stane made no reply, but sat looking in the fire, and the girl watching
him, drew her own conclusion from his silence, a conclusion that was
far from favourable to Gerald Ainley. She wondered what were the
questions Stane had wished to ask her uncle's secretary; and which, as
she was convinced, he had been a