don’t know if I can escape them. If so, I shall try and get hold of one of Mason’s dresses and hats and meet you in Serle Street, outside Lincoln’s Inn. But it is very risky. Do be careful that you are not followed.”

The next was upon pale green notepaper, bearing in gold the heading, “S.Y. Regina,” with the added words, “Off the Faroe Islands:—

“I am longing to be back again in town, but it cannot be for another four or five weeks. We have decided to do the Fiords. Do not write, as your letter must go through so many hands before it reaches me. What you tell me makes me suspicious. Why should they ask you that question if there had not been some whisper? Find out. Remember I have enemies—very bitter ones. It was hazardous of you to come to Glasgow. I saw you on the quay when we sailed. But you may have been recognised. If so, think of my position. Again I do beg of you to be as cautious as I am. From me the world shall never know the truth. I can keep a secret. See if you cannot do so, for my sake.”

Apparently the fellow had preserved all her letters, either because he was so deeply in love with her, or with that ulterior motive of which she had so openly accused him.

“Why did you speak to me on the stairs last night?” she asked, reproachfully, in another hastily-written note upon plain paper. “You imperil me at every moment. You may love me as fervently as you declare you do, but surely you should do nothing that may imperil my good name!”

In another, evidently of more recent date, she wrote:

“I cannot understand you. Our love has been a very foolish romance. Let us part and agree to forget it. I have been injudicious, and so have you. Let us agree to be friends, and I will, I assure you, do all I can for your interests in the future. Sometimes I think that Mason suspects. She may have seen you speak to me, or overheard you. She looks at me so very strangely sometimes, and I’m sure she watches me.”

Again in another communication, which was besmirched by the dead man’s blood, writing from the Hotel Ritz, in Paris, she said:—

“We are in deadly peril, both of us—but you more especially. E— knows the truth. Avoid him. He intends to betray you. I met J— in the Bois to-day, and he asked if you were in Paris. I pretended to be ignorant of your very existence, but he told me that E— had explained certain things, and he promised to keep my secret. I send you fifty pounds enclosed. 

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