slave here at
your feet? Connie! Connie!"

Afar in the distance rang a familiar cry; at the eerie sound their
pulses leaped in unison. The man put his whole soul into one fierce
appeal:

"Connie! my Queen!"

From without stole the answering call of the she-wolf.

With a soft little cry that was half a laugh, half a sob, she drew his
face down upon her bosom.

CHAPTER XX

A PASSAGE AT ARMS

At Brindisi, a month later, Grace found Douglass's letter awaiting her.
She kissed it furtively and thrust it in her bosom, reserving its
reading for the privacy of her room. Not until she had crept into bed
did she open the prosaic government-stamped envelope which he
methodically used. She always read his letters so, punctuating each
tender sentence with a kiss and going to sleep with It tucked In her
nightdress next her heart.

This was an unusually bulky enclosure and she hugged it in anticipation;
how sweet it was of him to devote so much of his time to her in his
busiest season. Passionately she pressed her lips to it again and with a
sigh of delight drew out--a single sheet of note paper enclosing a
closely-folded page of printed matter.

As though doubting her senses, she sat erect in bed and unfolded the
newspaper; there was nothing enclosed therein and with perplexity writ
large all over her face she turned curiously to the written sheet.

Slowly, as one in a daze, she read and reread it a dozen times; it was
very short and in nowise ambiguously phrased, yet she did not seem able
to grasp its meaning:

"My congratulations on the speed and facility with which your very
astute and clever mother has extricated you from what must
certainly have been a very embarrassing entanglement. May you be as
happy in your new exalted station as you once made me imagine I was
going to be!

"Owing you, as I do, not only my life but my fortune as well, for
my mines are now in bonanza, I confess to even a greater
indebtedness: you gave me a six-month of the only happiness I have
ever known. But you would have rendered me an incalculably greater
service had you left those dynamite cartridges undisturbed that
day.

"If in the mutations of time and chance you should ever have need
of me, the life and fortune which you gave are at your command.
Good-by."

In an agony of bewilderment she took up the newspaper, intuitively
seeking the Society Columns.