hands like a blind person.

"Oh, my dear," she said as he caught them. They went on again together.
She spoke of his father, of the talk of the countryside. But he had an
argument for each of hers.

"Be brave for just a little, Stella. Once we are married there will be no
trouble," and with his arms about her she was eager to believe.

Stella Ballantyne sat late that night in the armchair in her bedroom, her
eyes fixed upon the empty grate, in a turmoil of emotion. She grew cold
and shivered. A loud noise of birds suddenly burst through the open
window. She went to it. The morning had come. She looked across the
meadow to the silent house of Little Beeding in the grey broadening
light. All the blinds were down. Were they all asleep or did one watch
like her? She came back to the fireplace. In the grate some torn
fragments of a letter caught her eyes. She stooped and picked them up.
They were fragments of the letter of regret which she had written earlier
that evening.

"I should have sent it," she whispered. "I should not have gone. I should
have sent the letter."

But the regret was vain. She had gone. Her maid found her in the morning
lying upon her bed in a deep sleep and still wearing the dress in which
she had gone out.

CHAPTER XVII

TROUBLE FOR MR. HAZLEWOOD

When Dick and Stella walked along the drive to the lane Harold Hazlewood,
who was radiant at the success of his dinner-party, turned to Robert
Pettifer in the hall.

"Have a whisky-and-soda, Robert, before you go," he said. He led the way
back into the library. Behind him walked the Pettifers, Robert
ill-at-ease and wishing himself a hundred miles away, Margaret Pettifer
boiling for battle. Hazlewood himself dropped into an arm-chair.

"I am very glad that you came to-night, Margaret," he said boldly. "You
have seen for yourself."

"Yes, I have," she replied. "Harold, there have been moments this evening
when I could have screamed."

Robert Pettifer hurriedly turned towards the table in the far corner
of the room where the tray with the decanters and the syphons had
been placed.

"Margaret, I pass my life in a scream at the injustice of the world,"
said Harold Hazlewood, and Robert Pettifer chuckled as he cut off the end
of a cigar. "It is strange that an act of reparation should move you in
the same way."

"Reparation!" cried Margaret Pettifer indignantly. Then she noticed that
the window was open. She looked around the room. She