lady, my mistress, and simply Mrs.
Blair." The correction and information were vouchsafed with cold
self-possession. "Are you coming?"

"I don't really see why I should," I said, not too civilly. "Why
should I be at her beck and call? If she had been in any trouble, any
serious trouble, such as she anticipated when talking to me at the
buffet, and a prey to imaginary alarms since become real, I should
have been ready to serve her or any woman in distress, but nothing of
this could have happened in the short hour's run so far."

"I thought you were a gentleman," was the scornful rejoinder. "A nice
sort of gentleman, indeed, to sit there like a stock or a stone when a
lady sends for you!"

"A lady!" There was enough sarcasm in my tone to bring a flush upon
her impassive face, a fierce gleam of anger in her stolid eyes; and
when I added, "A fine sort of lady!" I thought she would have struck
me. But she did no more than hiss an insolent gibe.

"You call yourself an officer, a colonel? I call you a bounder, a
common cad."

"Be off!" I was goaded into crying, angrily. "Get away with you; I
want to have nothing more to say to you or your mistress. I know what
you are and what you have been doing, and I prefer to wash my hands of
you both. You're not the kind of people I like to deal with or wish to
know."

She stared at me open-mouthed, her hands clenched, her eyes half out
of her head. Her face had gone deadly white, and I thought she would
have fallen there where she stood, a prey to impotent rage.

Now came a sudden change of scene. The lady, Mrs. Blair, as I had just
heard her called, appeared behind, her taller figure towering above
the maid's, her face in full view, vexed with varying acute emotions,
rage, grief, and terror combined.

CHAPTER III.

"What's all this?" she cried in great agitation. "Wait, do not speak,
Philpotts, leave him to me.... Do you go back to our place this
instant; we cannot be away together, you know that; _it_ must not be
left alone, one of us must be on guard over it. Hurry, hurry, I never
feel that _it_ is safe out of our sight.

"Now, sir," Mrs. Blair turned on me fiercely, "will you be so good as
to explain how I find you quarrelling with my maid, permitting
yourself to cast aspersions, to make imputations upon two unprotected
women?"

"How much have you overheard?" I asked, feeling very small already. My
self-reproach was aroused even before I quailed under the withe