Forde alone with the corpse, uncertain whether, in default of the living man, he might not wreak his vengeance on the dead, and it was with a gasp of relief he saw Mr. Forde out of the study, and locked the door behind him.

"Ask Mrs. Mortomley to speak to me for a minute," he whispered to Mrs.

Werner's maid, and when Dolly came to him on the landing, he told her all Mr. Forde had said.

Dolly listened to the end, then she answered,

"Tell Mr. Forde from me, that if he waits in this house for ever, he shall never speak to Mrs. Werner, but that if he has any communication to make, Lord Darsham will see him this evening at eight o'clock."

Downstairs went Williams with this message, which Dolly, leaning over the banisters, heard him deliver in less curt language.

"I know nothing of Lord Darsham," answered Mr. Forde, walking up and down the hall. "I have had no transactions with him, but I have with that fellow," an intimation indicating Werner lying dead in the study.

"He has robbed us, and ruined me, and by--I will see his wife."

"Williams," rang out Dolly's voice at this juncture, clear and shrill, and yet with an undertone of intensified passion in it, "if that person insists on remaining in a house where there is so much misery, send for a policeman. I will take the responsibility."

And forthwith Dolly retreated to Mrs. Werner's dressing-room, and bolted the doors of that and her friend's apartment.

She had once been brave, but the days and the weeks and the months had been draining her courage. Physically, she felt she was not strong enough to encounter one of the people who had compassed her husband's ruin; and though she would have fought for Leonora till she died, still her woman's nature warned her to shun a fight if possible.

"You will go now please, sir," urged poor Williams, "and come back and see his lordship to-night."

Whereupon Mr. Forde anathematized his lordship, and asked,

"How does that woman, that wife of Mortomley's, come here?"

"She was sent for, sir; my mistress has been quieter since her arrival.

They are old friends."

"Humph," ejaculated Mr. Forde; "then any fool can tell where Henry Werner's money went." And he permitted himself to be edged out to the door-step by Williams, who took an early opportunity of saying he was wanted and of shutting the door hastily on that unwelcome visitor.

All that afternoon Williams surveyed callers doubtfully from a side window before opening the door. Had Mr. Forde again appeared, he would have put up the chain, and parleyed with him like a beleaguered city to the opposing force.

About six o'clock Lord Darsham came rattling up in a hansom. He had telegraphed back a reply to Dolly, and followed that reply as fast as an express train could bring him.

She ran downstairs, thankful for his arrival, and after years, long, long years, the Vicar of Dassell's little girl and Charley Trebasson, Leonora's first lover, met again.

"I should have known you anywhere," he said, after the first words of greeting and exclamations of pity and horror were uttered.

"Am I so little changed?" she asked, with a forced smile.

"Ah! you are so much changed," he answered; "you look so many years too old, you look so much too thin. What is the matter with you Mrs.

Mortomley? I cannot bear to--"

"Never mind me," she said almost brusquely; "Your business now is with Leonora; I ought not to have sent you that telegram, you must forget it."

"Is Mr. Werner not dead then?" he asked.

"Dead! yes, indeed he is poor fellow!" she answered; "but I acted on a fancy when I telegraphed that he committed suicide. He took chloroform to relieve the pain of neuralgia, and the chloroform killed him."

Mrs. Werner's cousin looked Mrs. Mortomley steadily in the face while she uttered this sentence, then, when she paused and hesitated, he said,

"You had better be perfectly frank with me. I remember, if you do not, how when you were a child, it was of no use your trying to tell a fib because your eyes betrayed you, and I must say to you now, as I often said to you then, speak the truth, for with that tell-tale face no one will believe you when you try to invent a likely falsehood."

"To be perfectly straightforward then," answered Dolly; "when I sent that telegram to you I believed Mr. Werner had destroyed himself; when I arrived here, I found every one believed his death was due entirely to accident."

"And may I inquire why you believed he had committed suicide?"

"No," she replied; "that is my secret, and for very special reasons I want to have nothing to do with the matter--special reasons," she repeated; "not selfish, pray understand. I did not think of the inquest; I did not think of anything except that, on Leonora's account, you ought to be here, when I wrote that telegram, and--"

"I know what you mean," he interrupted; seeing the subject affected her deeply, and he took a turn up and down the room before he spoke again.

"What could have induced him to kill himself?" he said, at length stopping abruptly in his walk.

"A Mr. Forde, who has been here to-day, demanding to see Leonora, and who is coming this evening to see you, told Williams he was afraid to meet his creditors. Williams, who has never seen the slightest evidence of shortness of money about this house, inclines to the opinion that Mr.

Forde is mad, and I have done my best to confirm that opinion, but Mr.

Forde I believe to be right; I am afraid you will find he destroyed himself, because he was a ruined man."

There was silence for a minute, broken only by the sound of Dolly's suppressed sobs.

"Poor fellow," said Lord Darsham; "he must have suffered horribly before it came to this."

"Only those who have gone through such an ordeal can imagine what he must have endured," she answered simply; "depend upon it his heart was broken days before he died."

"I never liked Werner," commented her auditor. "I always thought him a self-contained money-worshiping snob, and I never believed, spite of the purple and fine linen, that Leonora was happy in her marriage, but I am sorry for him now. A man who commits suicide must have an enormous capacity for misery, and a man who has an enormous capacity for misery must have had an enormous capacity for something better, had any opportunity for developing it occurred."

"You will forget my telegram," she entreated.

"I shall say nothing about it, which will amount to much the same thing," he answered.

CHAPTER XI.

TWO UNWELCOME VISITORS.

The business of living goes on all the same let who will retire from active participation in it, and, accordingly, Mrs. Mortomley and Lord Darsham sat down to dinner, although the whilom master of the house lay dead in that small room on the other side the hall, where he had made his exit from this world. But, in truth, that dinner was a very funereal affair. There was a something ghastly in eating of the ruined man's substance; in drinking of the wines he had selected; in occupying the apartment where he must often have sat at table with a guest no one else could see facing him; and the conversation in Williams's presence, compulsorily of no private nature, flagged as conversation did not often flag when Dolly held one of the battledores.

With great persuasion Mrs. Werner had been induced to swallow a draught ordered for her by the family physician, and she lay in a sleep as sound and almost as dreamless as that which enfolded the silent figure lying all alone in the twilight of the summer's evening.

Thirty hours before, he was alive; and now, his spirit had started on the long, lonesome journey; and through the gloom of the Valley of the Shadow no human eye could follow him.

Dolly could not get over the horror of it all; and when Mr. Forde's knock woke the echoes of the house, she started from her seat in an access of terror, and exclaiming,

"Oh! let me get upstairs before he comes in," left the room, and ran upstairs to Mrs. Werner's apartment.

Meanwhile, Williams, before answering the summons, inquired whether his Lordship would be pleased to see the expected visitor, and if so, where.