conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother’s cottage? I was too bewildered—too conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach—to speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again that first broke the silence between us.     

       “I want to ask you something,” she said suddenly. “Do you know many people in London?”     

       “Yes, a great many.”     

       “Many men of rank and title?” There was an unmistakable tone of suspicion in the strange question. I hesitated about answering it.     

       “Some,” I said, after a moment’s silence.     

       “Many”—she came to a full stop, and looked me searchingly in the face—“many men of the rank of Baronet?”     

       Too much astonished to reply, I questioned her in my turn.     

       “Why do you ask?”     

       “Because I hope, for my own sake, there is one Baronet that you don’t know.”     

       “Will you tell me his name?”     

       “I can’t—I daren’t—I forget myself when I mention it.” She spoke loudly and almost fiercely, raised her clenched hand in the air, and shook it passionately; then, on a sudden, controlled herself again, and added, in tones lowered to a whisper “Tell me which of them you know.”     

       I could hardly refuse to humour her in such a trifle, and I mentioned three names. Two, the names of fathers of families whose daughters I taught; one, the name of a bachelor who had once taken me a cruise in his yacht, to make sketches for him.     

       “Ah! you don’t know him,” she said, with a sigh of relief. “Are you a man of rank and title yourself?”     

       “Far from it. I am only a drawing-master.”     

       As the reply passed my lips—a little bitterly, perhaps—she took my arm with the abruptness which characterised all her actions.     

       “Not a 

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