ir. I will trouble you with
no explanations. I will only ask one question. Have you a memorandum of
the number of that five-hundred pound note you paid away in France?"

Hardyman lost all control over himself.

"You scoundrel!" he cried, "have you been prying into my private
affairs? Is it _your_ business to know what I did in France?"

"Is it _your_ vengeance on a woman to refuse to tell her the number of a
bank-note?" Moody rejoined, firmly.

That answer forced its way, through Hardyman's anger, to Hardyman's
sense of honor. He rose and advanced to Moody. For a moment the two men
faced each other in silence. "You're a bold fellow," said Hardyman, with
a sudden change from anger to irony. "I'll do the lady justice. I'll
look at my pocketbook."

He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat; he searched his
other pockets; he turned over the objects on his writing-table. The book
was gone.

Moody watched him with a feeling of despair. "Oh! Mr. Hardyman, don't
say you have lost your pocketbook!"

He sat down again at his desk, with sullen submission to the new
disaster. "All I can say is you're at liberty to look for it," he
replied. "I must have dropped it somewhere." He turned impatiently to
the foreman, "Now then! What is the next check wanted? I shall go mad if
I wait in this damned place much longer!"

Moody left him, and found his way to the servants' offices. "Mr.
Hardyman has lost his pocketbook," he said. "Look for it, indoors and
out--on the lawn, and in the tent. Ten pounds reward for the man who
finds it!"

Servants and waiters instantly dispersed, eager for the promised reward.
The men who pursued the search outside the cottage divided their forces.
Some of them examined the lawn and the flower-beds. Others went straight
to the empty tent. These last were too completely absorbed in pursuing
the object in view to notice that they disturbed a dog, eating a stolen
lunch of his own from the morsels left on the plates. The dog slunk away
under the canvas when the men came in, waited in hiding until they had
gone, then returned to the tent, and went on with his luncheon.

Moody hastened back to the part of the grounds (close to the shrubbery)
in which Isabel was waiting his return.

She looked at him, while he was telling her of his interview with
Hardyman, with an expression in her eyes which he had never seen in them
before--an expression which set his heart beating wildly, and made him
break o