"Yes, sir, went away with Mrs. Mortomley in a cab an hour and a half ago."

"Where did he go to?" asked Mr. Werner.

"Don't know, sir. No orders were given to the cabman in my presence or hearing."

Mr. Werner stood silent for an instant, then he said, turning to Williams,

"Ask your mistress to come down here. Say I will not detain her a moment." And while the man went to do his bidding, he walked up and down the room evidently as ill at ease as his visitors.

Into the room Mrs. Werner walked stately and beautiful, her rich dress rustling over the carpet, jewels sparkling on her snowy neck, amid her dark hair, and on her white arms.

She started at sight of the two visitors, but quickly recovering herself, gave her hand frigidly to each in succession.

"Ah! but, madam, we have no need to ask if your health be admirable,"

Kleinwort was beginning, when Mr. Werner interrupted his ecstacy with ruthless abruptness.

"Leonora," he said, "these gentlemen want to know where Mr. and Mrs.

Mortomley have gone. If it is no secret, pray inform them."

"They are here," she instantly replied.

"No, they are not; they left in a cab an hour ago or more. Can you imagine where they have gone?"

"I cannot imagine that they have left," she answered. "You must be mistaken."

"If you please, ma'am," here interrupted Williams, who had remained standing at the door after Mrs. Werner's entrance, with an apologetic grasp upon the handle, "Mrs. Mortomley left a note for you. She told me not to mention this till all the company had left, but I suppose, under present circumstances, it is correct for me to do so."

"I will go for it," Mrs. Werner said, with a little gasp, but Mr. Werner prevented her intention. "Let your maid do so."

There ensued an awkward pause, during which Mr. Kleinwort, with much _empressement_, handed Mrs. Werner a chair.

"No, thank you," she remarked, and the pause continued, and the depth and gloom of the silence increased minute by minute.

At length the maid, having found the note, brought it into the room.

"Give it to me," exclaimed Mr. Forde, trying to snatch it off the salver, but Mrs. Werner's face warned him of the impropriety he had committed.

"The note is intended for me, Mr. Forde, I think," she said quietly, and opened the envelope after a courteous "Pray excuse me."

As she read her face darkened.

"Where are they, where have they gone?" demanded Mr. Forde eagerly.

Mrs. Werner lifted her eyes and looked at him slowly and absently, as if she had forgotten his existence.

"I do not know," she answered. "Mrs. Mortomley does not say, and I have not an idea unless they have returned to Homewood. Mrs. Mortomley unfortunately understood Mr. Werner objected to my having invited her and her husband here, and she hastened to leave a house where their presence was unwelcome."

Having unburdened herself of which statement, Mrs. Werner gathered up her ample skirt, and with a distant bow to both gentlemen left the room.

Mr. Werner went after her.

"Leonora," he said as she ascended the staircase, but she never answered him. "Leonora," he repeated, but still she made no more sign than if she had been deaf.

Then following rapidly, he stood beside her on the landing.

"Leonora," he entreated, laying his hand on her arm with a pleading gentleness difficult to associate with Henry Werner.

She stood quite still and looked at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before through all their married life, which God pity any man who ever sees it in the face of his wife, in the face of the mother of his children.

"Do not speak to me about them to-night," she said. "Hereafter perhaps, but not now," and her voice was changed and hard as Dolly had heard it.

"Will you give me her note?" he asked.

"Yes, it is your right," and she gave him the paper she held crushed in her hand, a paper on which Dolly had traced mad words in wonderful hieroglyphics.

After his guests had all departed, when the house was silent and quiet and lonely, and he was quite by himself, Henry Werner smoothed out that crumpled manuscript and read the sentences Dolly had written in her haste.

There was much she had better have left unwritten, as there is in all such effusions, much that was feminine and foolish, and passionate and exaggerated. But it ended with two sentences which burned themselves on Mr. Werner's brain.

"If it were not for your sake, darling, I would wish that the man you have had the misfortune to marry might be beggared and ruined to-morrow--beggared, more completely ruined, more utterly even than we have been.

"As it is, I shall never forgive him--never for ever--never.

"DOLLY."

With a shiver Mr. Werner folded up Dolly's epistle and placed it in his pocket-book. Then he did a most unwonted thing for him; indeed, I might say unprecedented,--he poured out nearly a glass of brandy and drank it off.

"After all," he thought, "there is more in having a wife who is fond of her husband than most fellows think. That little woman is as brave over her sick husband as a hen about a brood of young chickens. I wonder if she has taken him back to Homewood; or rather I do not wonder, for I know she would sooner do anything than that."

And in this idea he was perfectly correct; Dolly had found a shelter for her sick husband, but not at Homewood.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE.

Off one of the cross roads leading from Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill to Upper Clapton, there stood a few years back, and still stand, for aught the writer knows to the contrary, a few pairs of semi-detached houses, undoubtedly respectable as to position and appearance, but painfully small in their internal arrangement--houses suitable both as regarded rent and position for a couple of maiden ladies, for a widow and her son, for a newly married couple, or for any one in fact whose family chanced to be as circumscribed in number as his income in amount.

All told, these desirable residences contained only seven rooms; but the windows of those rooms overlooked, both back and front, pleasant gardens, and the road in which they stood ended in a brick wall covered with ivy, so that the inmates were crazed with no noise of passing vehicles. Altogether a quiet out-of-the-world little Grove, for by that name it was called, which a person might have wandered about Stamford Hill and Clapton for ever without discovering, had he not chanced upon it by accident, or happened to know some one resident in it.

But Dolly Mortomley was familiar with that out-of-the-way nook.

A widow with whom she had been well acquainted in the old Dassell days, coming to London for the sake of being near her only son, had asked Mrs.

Mortomley to look her out a house, _small_, _genteel_, _cheap_, in a _respectable neighbourhood_, _readily accessible to the City_--all these requirements being italicised; and after weary searching, Dolly wrote down triumphantly that she had found and taken the very residence described, and that if her friend would send up her furniture, and come and stay for a week at Homewood while the place was put in order, everything should be made comfortable for her, so that she might walk, without any fuss or trouble, into her new home.

Mrs. Baker was the name of the new tenant who took possession of number eight, in which she lived for nearly two years,--to the great contentment of tradespeople, tax-collectors, and landlord, for she lived regularly and paid regularly, as only persons possessed of a fixed income punctually received, can do.