very ungallant, might have resulted in my transference from the train to a police-cell. It was equally out of the question to seize on the valise and examine its contents. To press her with further questions would be as little to the purpose; for if, accepting her plea of dumbness, I committed them to paper, she would doubtless refuse to answer. All I could do was to sit in silence, resolving in my own mind not to lose sight of her on reaching London, but to follow her and find out if possible the place of her abode.

So I whiled away the rest of the journey in reading, or in trying to read, some Christmas annuals. Dora Vane, to give the lady the name she had claimed, having glanced through the magazines, was now apparently asleep in her corner of the compartment. It was only a feigned sleep however, for whenever I moved, she would give a start, plainly showing that she was suspicious of me.

The train was delayed considerably by the adverse weather, and it was not till past seven o'clock that we entered Charing Cross Station. I opened the carriage-door, and, emerging first, assisted the veiled lady to[Pg 27] alight. Two points were noticeable in her behaviour while stepping from the train—the care with which she guarded the bag, and the care she took to avert her face from me. As there was not a soul on the platform to welcome her, I was on the point of proffering my services to escort her to her destination, but with a friendly nod to me she flitted off without a moment's delay to the end of the station, and then hailing a cab, was driven off. And it seemed to me that, instead of handing the driver a card with an address on it, as a dumb lady might naturally be supposed to do, she had conveyed her orders to him by word of mouth; but I was too far off to be certain of this. However, the moment the vehicle had disappeared beneath the archway I flung my portmanteau and person into a hansom, calling out to the driver:

[Pg 27]

"Follow the cab that has just left. Don't lose sight of it for a moment. Don't get in front, but keep behind it. I want to see where the lady gets out. You understand?"

The man nodded with a grin and a mystical remark about being "up to snuff," then he touched his horse's flank lightly with the whip, and we bowled out of the station in gallant style, following in the wake of the cab.

London lay beneath the murky gaslights wrapped in a winding-sheet of snow, not sufficiently deep, however, to stop vehicular traffic, though it retarded it to a considerable extent. The snow was an advantage in one 

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