's
side. And yet she will be under a long three years guardianship." Some
busy devil at his side whispered: "She would be helpless if she were
carried off." And as the enraged schemer finished the last of a dozen
cigars and took a pull at his pocket flask, he disposed himself to
sleep, grumbling.

"They have upset all the chessmen. Old Fraser and the Louison, too, are
playing at cross purposes--evidently. They have, however, spoiled my
little game. I will spoil theirs!" He grinned as he decided "I will do
a bit of the Romeo act with Justine, and come back by Granville to
Boulogne. If the old gang is to be found there, I may get one of them
to spy the whole thing out. All these Jersey people are half French in
their birth and ways. I can sneak some fellow in from Granville. There
might be a chance. I'll get to the old fellow, or the girl, or the
jewels--by God! I will! For I hold the trump cards."

And yet his flattering hopes of gaining a permanent rank returned to
affright him in planning such a bold deed. "Ah! I must get some trusty
fellow--perhaps, in London," he muttered as his head dropped, and the
train bore him on to the halls of learning, where poor Justine was now
weeping on her sister's bosom, and unveiling all the secrets of a hungry
heart to the sympathetic Euphrosyne.

But, saddest of all the coterie who had trodden the tessellated floors
of the marble house at Delhi, was a lonely girl sobbing herself to
sleep, that very night, in a gray castellated mansion house perched upon
a sunny cliff of Jersey.

The fair gardens and splendid halls of the luxurious home seemed but
the limits of a cheerless prison to the broken-hearted girl who had
been astounded when her one friend, Douglas Fraser, the companion of a
thirty-five days' journey, left her without a word. Nadine Johnstone had
opened her heart, shyly, to her manly young kinsman, Douglas Fraser.
And yet she guarded, as only a maiden's heart can, the secret of the
blossoming love for Hardwicke--the man who had saved her life. She asked
her hungry heart if he would follow on her way, led by the appeal of her
shining eyes.

Worn, harassed, and wearied out by travel, she had sought a refuge in
Justine Delande's clinging arms, on the night of their arrival from
Boulogne, for the path from India had been but a series of shadow-dance
glimpses of strange scenes. The ashen face of the tottering old pedant
had offered her no welcome to a happy home.

"How hide