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"I don't like to mention it; but my poor roof is at your service, and I would go with you to at daybreak to-morrow." The stranger stared at the cottager, and then at the dingy walls of the hut. He was about, very abruptly, to reject the hospitable proposal, when his eye rested suddenly on the form of Alice, who stood eager-eyed and open-mouthed, gazing on the handsome intruder.

Then facing Clowes he said: "And I advise you ter have a care how you speak of Miss Meredith. I'll not brook hearing her aspersed." With this threat he left the room. "I regret to have been an intruder on so tender a scene," sneered the commissary; "but I came with information that was too important to delay.

At almost every cabin a dog ran out to blaspheme at the intruder, but a wave of the man's pistol sent them yelping under the floors again. When the constable entered a house, Peter could hear him bumping and rattling among the furnishings, while the black householders stood outside the door and watched him disturb their housekeeping arrangements.

As instinctively P. Sybarite bristled between the two. "Well?" he snapped at the intruder. An impatient gesture of a hand immaculately gloved in white abolished him completely as far, at least, as the other was concerned. "Ah Miss Lessing, I believe?" The voice was strong and musical but poisoned with a malicious triumph that grated upon the nerves of P. Sybarite; he declined to be abolished.

Then, drawing a table before the door opening into the adjoining room, he intrenched himself behind it as behind a rampart, and awaited the approach of the enemy. The next moment the door was forced open, and a squad of police, under the command of Inspector Gevrol, entered the room. "Surrender!" cried the inspector. Martial did not move; his pistol was turned upon the intruder.

The next moment he had forgotten his philosophy, and his companion his business. Both flew to the assistance of the fair intruder, who, albeit the least injured of the trio, clung breathlessly to the bulwarks. "Miss Keene!" ejaculated both gentlemen. "Oh dear! I beg your pardon," said the young lady, reddening, with a naive mingling of hilarity and embarrassment.

"It may be delicate; I admit that it is so for you: but as my plans may depend somewhat upon a knowledge of your instructions, I really feel compelled to insist upon this point, Captain Passford," replied the intruder as blandly as ever. "But we are living just now in a state of war, and it is quite impossible to act with as much delicacy us one might desire."

The communication is resumed the night of the same day. 'Two days at Beckley Court are over, and that strange sensation I had of being an intruder escaped from Dubbins's, and expecting every instant the old schoolmistress to call for me, and expose me, and take me to the dark room, is quite vanished, and I feel quite at home, quite happy. Evan is behaving well. Quite the young nobleman.

I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me a little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement and looked carefully around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive any one at all.

For the moment there flashed across my brain the shadows of all the Christmas stories I had ever read or heard concerning vestries; the phantom bridal, in which the bride's beautiful white hand changed to the bony fingers of a skeleton as she signed the register; the unearthly christening, in which all at once, after the ceremony having been conducted with the utmost respectability, to the edification of the unauthorised intruder hiding behind a pillar, the godfathers and godmothers, nurse and baby, priest and clerk, became in a moment dilapidated corpses; whereon the appalled intruder fell prone at the foot of his pillar, there to be discovered the next morning by his friends, and the public generally, with his hair blanched to an awful whiteness, or his noble intellect degraded to idiocy.