n
to his perturbed mind, conveyed a vague surprise. It was, to all intents
and purposes, a cell, with stone-paved floor and plaster walls. An
antique lamp, wherein rested what appeared to be a small ball of light,
unlike any illuminant he had seen, stood upon a massive table, which was
littered with papers. Excepting a chair of peculiar design and a
magnificently worked Oriental curtain which veiled either a second door
or a recess in the wall, the place otherwise was unfurnished.

Before this curtain, and facing him, pale but composed, stood Lady Mary
Evershed, a sweet picture in a bizarre setting.

"Has your friend run away, then?" said Haredale roughly.

The girl did not reply, but looked fully at him with something of scorn
and much of reproach in her eyes.

"I know whose house this is," continued Haredale violently, "and why you
have come. What is he to you? Why do you know him--visit him--shield
him? Oh! my God! it only wanted this to complete my misery. I have, now,
not one single happy memory to take away with me."

His voice shook upon those last words.

"Mary," he said sadly, and all his rage was turned to pleading--"what
does it mean? Tell me. I _know_ there is some simple explanation----"

"You shall hear it, Sir Richard," interrupted a softly musical voice.

He turned as though an adder had bitten him; the blase composure which
is the pride of every British officer had melted in the rays of those
blue eyes that for years had been the stars of his worship. It was a
very human young man, badly shaken and badly conscious of his display of
weakness, who faced the tall figure in the tightly buttoned frock-coat
that now stood in the open doorway.

The man who had interrupted him was one to arrest attention anywhere and
in any company. With figure and face cast in a severely classic mould,
his intense, concentrated gaze conveyed to Haredale a throbbing sense of
_force_, in an uncanny degree.

"Severac Bablon!" flashed through his mind.

"Himself, Sir Richard."

Haredale, who had not spoken, met the weird, fixed look, but with a
consciousness of physical loss--an indefinable sensation, probably
mental, of being drawn out of himself. No words came to help him.

"You have acted to-night," continued Severac Bablon, and Haredale,
knowing himself in the presence of the most notorious criminal in
Europe, yet listened passively, as a schoolboy to the admonition of his
Head, "you have acted to-night unworthi