inconsistency can ever be strange, that Stewart Routh,
a man of eminently vindictive disposition, entirely
forgot to take into account that the woman
thus desperately injured might also seek her
revenge, which would consist in declining to
take her own freedom at the price of giving him
his.

Perhaps if the depths of that dark heart had
been sounded, the depths beyond its own
consciousness—the unvisited, unquestioned,
profound — it would have been discovered that this
man was so entirely accustomed to the devotion
of the woman who loved him with a desperate
though intelligent love, that even in her utmost
despair and extreme outrage of wrong he felt
assured she would do that which it was his will
she should do.

During all this mental review he had hardly
bestowed a thought on George Dallas. He
would be safe enough in the end, if the worst
came to the worst. It had suited him to
magnify the strength of the chain of
coincidences, which looked like evidence, in discussing
them with George, and he had magnified it; it
suited him to diminish that strength in discussing
ithem with himself, and he diminished it. A
good deal of suffering and disgrace to all the
"Felton-Dallas-Carruthers connexion," as he
insolently phrased it in his thoughts, must come
to pass, of course, but no real danger. And
if it were not so? Well, in that case, he really
could not afford to care. When he had wanted
money, Deane (he still thought of him by that
name) had had to give way to that imperative
need. Now he wanted safety, and Dallas must
pay its price. There was something of the sublime
of evil in this man's sovereign egotism. As he
turned his mind away from the path it had been
forced to tread to the end, he thought, " there
is a touch of the whimsical in everything; in this
it is the demi-semi-relationship between Harriet
and these people. I suppose the sensitive lady
of Poynings never heard of her step-father
Creswick's niece."

A letter for Mr. Routh, a delicate, refined-
looking letter, sealed with the daintiest of
monograms, the thick board-like envelope
containing a sheet of paper to match, on which
only a few lines are scrawled. But as
Stewart Routh reads them, his sinister dark
eyes gleam with pleasure and triumph, and his
handsome, evil face is deeply flushed.

"Bearer waits." Mr. Routh writes an
answer to the letter, short but ardent, if any one
had now been there to judge by the expression
of his face while he was writing it. He calls his
clerk, who takes the letter to " bearer;" but that
individual has been profiting by the interval to
try the beer in a closely adjacent beer-shop,
and the letter is laid upon a table in the
passage leading to Stewart Routh's rooms, to
await his return from the interesting investigation.

Another letter for Mr. Routh, and this time,
also, " bearer waits." Waits, too, in the
passage, and sees the letter lying on the table,
and has plenty of time to read the address
before the experimenting commissionaire
returns, has it handed to him, and trudges off
with it.

Presently the door at the end of the
passage opens, and Routh comes out. " Who
brought me a letter just now?" he says to the
clerk, and then stops short, and turns to
"bearer."

"Oh, it's you, Jim, is it? Take this to Mrs.
Routh."

Then Stewart Routh went back to his room,
and read again the note to which he had just
replied. It was from Harriet, and contained
only these words:

"Come home at the first possible moment.
A letter from G. D., detained by accident for
two days, has just come, and is of the utmost
importance. Let nothing detain you."

The joy and triumph in his face had given
way to fury; he muttered angry oaths as he tore
the note up viciously.

"All the more reason if the worst has come—
or is nearer than we thought — that I should
strike the decisive blow to-day. She has all
but made up her mind — she must make it
quite up to-day. This is Tuesday; the Asia
sails on Saturday. A letter from Dallas only
cannot bring about the final crash: nothing can
really happen till he is here. If I have only
ordinary luck, we shall be out of harm's way by
then."

A little later Stewart Routh made certain
changes in his dress, very carefully, and departed
from Tokenhouse-yard in a hansom, looking as
unlike a man with any cares, business or other
kind, upon his mind as any gentleman in all
London. " Queen's-gate, Kensington," he said
to the driver; and the last words of the letter,
daintily sealed, and written on board-like paper,
which was in his breast-pocket at that moment,
were:

" I will wait for you in the carriage at Queen's-
gate."

"I'm glad I seed that 'ere letter," said Jim
Swain to himself, as, deeply preoccupied by the
circumstances of the preceding day, he faced
towards Routh's house, " because when I put
Mr. Dallas on this here lay, I needn't let out
as I spied 'em home. I can 'count for knowin'
on the place permiskus." And then, from an
intricate recess of his dirty pocket, much complicated
with crumbs and fragments of tobacco,
Jim pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper.
"Teddy wrote it down quite right," he said,
and he smoothed out the paper, and transferred
it, for safer keeping, to his cap, in which he had
deposited the missive with which he was
charged.

When Jim Swain arrived at his destination,
and the door was opened to him, Harriet was in
the hall. She seemed surprised that he had
brought her a written answer. She had
expected merely a verbal reply, telling her how
soon Routh would be home. Jim pulled his
cap off hastily, taken by surprise at seeing her,
and while he handed her the note, looked at her