When George Dallas knew that his meeting with Clare Carruthers was imminent, he told his uncle one of the two circumstances of his life which he had hitherto concealed from him. As George expected, Mr. Felton received the communication with some seriousness. "A little while ago, George," he said, "this might have upset the new and good understanding happily established between Mr. Carruthers and yourself, but I am in hopes it will not do so now. I think the old gentleman's nature is fine and forgiving, when one gets beneath the crust, and I am not afraid now. The chance of seeing the young lady, not in his presence, for the first time--that would have been awkward and dangerous indeed--is most fortunate. You must make your peace with her in the first instance."  
Enough of the old habit of trick and expedient still adhered to George, in his improved moral condition, to induce him to entertain a passing thought that perhaps the necessity for Mr. Carruthers knowing he had had any previous acquaintance with Clare, might never arise; if she did not see that he must be told, George need not feel himself bound to tell him. But he rejected the impulse after a very little while, and was ashamed of it. When, therefore, Mr. Felton had left George alone at Sir Thomas Boldero's house, he had done so with intention, and without any purpose of returning.
 
"Meet me at my rooms afterwards," he had said to George. "And tell Miss Carruthers I will take leave to call on her at Mrs. Stanhope's this afternoon." George agreed, premising that he must look in at the Mercury office first, but would then be at his uncle's service. Left alone, he had applied himself, in a condition of extreme mental discomposure, to thinking of what he should say to Clare, and how he should say it. He had almost arranged a satisfactory programme before she came; after--well, after, he did not speak or look in the least like what he had intended, and if any one had asked him for an account of their interview (which no one did, it was destined to be utterly forgotten and overwhelmed in the tide of events), he would have been quite incapable of satisfying the demand.
 
The interview lasted long, and when, at its close, George Dallas put Clare Carruthers into her cousin's carriage, her face was closely veiled, and the little hand which lingered in his had not yet done trembling. As he stood on the door-step and watched the carriage out of sight, the young man's face was pale and agitated, but full of deep and sacred happiness too. An expression of resolve and hope, of courage and power, was upon his features, such as they had never before worn. Had he recalled the resolution he had taken for the time when Clare Carruthers should know Paul Ward as George Dallas, and had he renewed it, with fresh heart and energy, not unaided now by circumstances, not frowned upon by fate, no longer friendless? However that may have been, he carried a humbled and grateful heart with him, and felt himself a widely different man as he entered the dingy precincts of the Mercury office, from what he had been the last time he had crossed that threshold.
 
Mr. Cunningham was "in," and not only could see George, but was particularly anxious to see him.
 
"I was just writing to you, old fellow," he said, leaving off shaking hands with George, and beginning to tear up a brief and scrawly manuscript on flimsy which lay before him. "You have come in time to save me trouble and fourpence sterling."
 
"Anything about the business I wrote to you about?" asked George.
 
"Just that, sir. Of course I attended to it at once, and put Tatlow on to it on your account. They're said to be cautious chaps, the detectives, and of course it wouldn't pay for them to be said to be anything else; but I'm hanged if I ever believed it before. You may talk of depth, but Tatlow's unfathomable. Has the job from yon, sir, per medium of your humble servant, and flatly declines to report progress to me; goes in for doing business only with the principal, and when he comes to me not a word can I get out of him, except that he must know the address of a certain individual named Paul Ward."
 
"Paul Ward?" exclaimed George.
 
"Yes, Paul Ward! Great, fun, isn't it, George? And I really could not resist the joke of quizzing the detective a little bit. I was immensely tickled at the idea of your employing the man, and his looking after you. So I told him I knew Mr. Dallas was acquainted with a gentleman of that name, and could give him all the information he required."
 
George could not laugh, but he tried to smile. Nothing could lend the subject of his uncle's suspense and anxiety even a collaterally amusing effect for him, and this statement puzzled him.
 
"What on earth can I have to do with the matter?" he said. "The man must be travelling very far indeed out of the right tracks. No one in the world, as it is pretty plain, can be more ignorant of Felton's affairs than I am. He must be on a totally wrong scent; and if he has blundered in this way, it is only waste of time and money to employ him."
 
"Well," said Cunningham, a little disappointed that George did not enjoy the keenness of the capital joke as much as he did, "you must settle all that with him yourself, and find out from him, if you can--and, by Jove, I doubt it--how Paul Ward has got mixed up in your cousin's affairs (if he has got mixed up in them--and, mind, I don't feel sure even of that--he certainly did not say so) without your being a party to the transaction. I just gave Tatlow your address in Piccadilly, and told him you'd be there in a day or two."
 
"What did he say?" asked George, whose sense of mystification was increasing.
 
"Said he should call every day until you arrived,--no doubt he has been there to-day, or you'll find him there when you get home,--and disappeared, having got all the information I chose to give him, but not what he wanted; which is, I take it, the correct thing to do to a detective who observes the laws of discretion too absolutely."
 
Cunningham was laughing his jolly laugh, and George was wondering what Tatlow meant, when the entrance of a third individual on office business interrupted the friends' talk. George took leave, and went down-stairs. Arrived at the door, he stopped, ran up the first flight of dirty stairs again, and turned into a small room, dimly lighted by a dirty skylight, to the right of the first landing. In this sanctuary, strong smelling of dust, size, and printer's ink, lay files, bound and unbound, of the Mercury. A heavy volume was open on the clumsy thick-legged table which filled up the centre of the room. It contained the files of the newspaper for the first half of the current year.
 
"Let me see," said George, "she was not quite sure about the 22nd; but it must have been about that date."
 
Then he turned the leaves, and scanned the columns of advertisements, until he found in one the warning which Clare Carruthers had sent to Paul Ward. His eyes filled with tears as he read it. He called up one of the office people, and had a copy of the paper of that date looked for, out of which he carefully cut the advertisement, and consigned it to the keeping of the pocketbook which he always carried about him. He placed the little slip of printed paper in the same compartment in which Clare Carruthers's unconscious gift had so long lain hidden. As George threw open the doors of the hansom in which he had been driven from the Mercury office to Piccadilly, Jim Swain came to the wheel, and, touching his tousled head, asked if he might speak to him.
 
"Certainly," said George, getting out; "any message from Mr. Routh?"
 
"No, sir," said Jim, "it's not; it's somethin' very partic'lar, as I as 'ad to say to you this long time. It ain't rightly about myself--and--"
 
"Never mind, Jim; you can tell me all about it in the house," said George cheerily. "Come along." He opened the door with his key, and let himself and Jim into the hall. But there Mr. Felton met him, his face grave and care-worn, and, as George saw in a minute, with some additional lines of trouble in it.
 
"I'm so glad you have come, George. I found letters here when I got back."
 
"Letters from New York?"
 
"Yes."
 
George left Jim standing on the mat, going with his uncle into the room he had just left.
 
Mr. James Swain, who was accustomed to pass a good deal of his life in waiting about on steps, in passages, at horses' heads, and occasionally in kitchens, and to whom the comfortable hall of the house in Piccadilly presented itself as an agreeable temporary abode, considered it advisable to sit down and attend the leisure of Mr. Dallas. He had been for some minutes engaged partly in thinking what he should say to Mr. Dallas, partly in counting the squares in the tiles which floored the hall, hearing all the while a subdued sound of voices from the adjoining room, when a strange sort of cry reached his ears. He started up, and listened intently. The cry was not repeated; but in a few moments Mr. Felton came into the hall, looking frightened, and called loudly down the lower staircase for assistance. Two servants, a man and a woman, came quickly, and in the mean time Jim looked in at the open door. In another minute they were all in the dining-room in a confused group, gathered round an arm-chair, in which was lying the insensible death-like figure of George Dallas, his collar and necktie torn off, his waistcoat open, several letters on the table before him, and a card on the floor at his feet.
 
It was a very complete and dead swoon, and there was no explanation of it; none to be given to the servants, at least. Jim Swain did not touch George--he only looked on; and as, at the suggestion of the woman, they opened the window, and pushed the chair on which George was lying within the current of air, he picked up the card, over which one of the castors had passed. It was a small photographic portrait. The boy looked at it, and recognized, with surprise, that it was the likeness of Mr. Deane--that it was a fac-simile of a portrait he had looked at and handled a very little while ago. He put it down upon the table, and made to Mr. Felton the business-like suggestion that a doctor had better be sent for, and he had better be sent to fetch him, which was immediately acceded to.
 
When Jim returned, bringing with him a general practitioner, he was told that Mr. Dallas had "come to," but was "uncommon weak and confused, and crying like a child when he wasn't shivering," so that Jim felt his chances of an interview were small indeed.
 
"I can't see him, of course, and I wanted to, most partic'lar. He brought me in, hisself."
 
"Yes, yes, I know," said the male domestic, with importance; "but you can't see him, and there's no good in your waiting about here. Look round at eleven to-morrow, and I'll see what can be done for you."
 
Jim had nothing for it but to go disconsolately away. So he went.
 
While George Dallas and Clare Carruthers were talking together at Sir Thomas Boldero's house in Chesham-place, while the hours--never to be forgotten by either--were passing over them, the same hours were witnessing an interview not less-momentous for Harriet Routh and her beautiful foe.
 
Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge was ready to receive her visitor; and as her coquetry and vanity were omnivorous, much as she despised women, and sincerely as she enjoyed the knowledge of her power to make most of them envious and miserable, she had dressed herself very carefully. She was just a little bored by her present mode of existence. Routh could not be much with her; and though she had brought herself to believe that she really did feel an absorbing passion for him, somehow or other it left a good deal of her thoughts and her time unabsorbed, and she did not exactly know how to dispose of either. The romance of this kind of incognito life was all very well in its way, which was a pleasant way, and as far as it went, which certainly was very far, but not quite far enough. And she did get horribly bored, there was no denying it. When Routh's daily letter had been read--for she exacted that of him, of him who hated letter-writing, and whose hard actuality of nature needed all the incitement of her beauty, her coquetry, and her artfulness to rouse him to sentiment and give his language the eloquence of love--she had nothing but novels to fall back upon, and the vague prospect of a supplementary note or two, or trying on a new dress, or thinking what theatre she would go to, or what direction her afternoon drive should take. She was glad of the chance of seeing a new face, though it was only a woman's; and then the reason for receiving her was so sound, it was impossible Routh could object. Indeed, she could not see the force of his objections to her going out more, and seeing people in general; it could not matter now, and would sound better hereafter than this hidden residence in London; however, it could not last long, and it was very romantic, very. She had not had much chance in all her previous prosperous life of playing at romance, and she liked it; she would not like it, if it continued to mean boredom, much longer, but there was no danger of that.
 
No. 4 Hollington-square was one of those London houses which every one knows, furnished for people who take houses for the season, prettily, flimsily, sparingly; a house which tenants with money and taste could make very striking and attractive, which tenants without money and without taste would find very tolerable in its original condition. Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge possessed both; and as she made it a rule to have every advantage procurable by the use of either, the drawing-room in which she awaited the coming of her visitor was as pretty and coquettish a room as could easily have been seen. She had chosen a becoming costume, and an equally becoming attitude; and she looked beautiful indeed, in her rich morning dress of black silk, faced with rose-coloured satin and costly lace. The masses of her dark hair were coiled smoothly round her head, her white arms were without a jewel to turn the eye from their shapely beauty. She glanced at one of the many mirrors in the room as the page announced "a lady," and felt perfectly satisfied.
 
The room was long and narrow, though not large; and as Harriet walked from the door to the hearth-rug on which Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge stood, having gracefully risen in an attitude especially intended for her visitor's admiration, that lady had time to observe her appearance, and to experience a certain vague sense of discomfort not altogether unlike alarm. She saw a face which she remembered, but with which she could not connect any distinct recollection; a pale, fair, determined face with smooth light-brown hair framing a broad low brow, with keen piercing blue eyes, which looked steadily at her, and never dropped their fine-fringed lids, blue eyes in which power, will, and knowledge dwelt, as the shallow-souled woman they looked at, and through, felt, but did not understand. A face, so fixed in its expression of irremediable woe, a face so lost with all its self-possession, so full of despair with all its might of will, that a duller intellect than that of a meagre-brained woman must have recognized a story in it such as happily few human beings have to tell or to conceal. Harriet did not speak, or make any sign of salutation; but when she had quite reached her, Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge recovered herself, and said, with all her accustomed grace:
 
"I am so much obliged to you for calling. Pray take a seat. I think I know to what I am indebted for the pleasure of your visit;" and then she sank gracefully back into her low chair, and smiled her very best smile. The very best of those suited to the feminine capacity, of course. Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had quite a different set of smiles for men.
 
"I am quite sure you do not," said Harriet, in a low firm voice, and without availing herself of the invitation to be seated. "I am quite sure you have no notion of my business here. You shall know it; it is important, but brief."
 
"Madam," said the other, sitting upright, and turning slightly pale.
 
Harriet extended her hand with a gesture habitual to her, and said:
 
"Stay. You must hear me for your own sake. You will do well to hear me quietly, and to give me your very best attention. If I do not make the impression on you which I desire and intend to make, there is one other person beside myself who will suffer by my failure, and that person is you."
 
She dropped her hand and drew her breath. Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge looked at her with frightened distended eyes, speechless.
 
"You think I have come on a false pretext, and I have done so, to a certain extent. You lost an article of ornament or dress at Homburg?"
 
"I did--a locket," said Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, a little relieved, and glancing unconsciously towards her silver purse, which was at hand, and through whose meshes gold shone.
 
"I know, but I have not brought you your locket. You lost something else at Homburg, and I have brought it, to prove that you had better hear me, and that you must." And then Harriet laid upon the table, near by the side of the silver purse, a crushed and faded flower, whose rich luscious blossom had been of the deepest crimson in the time of its bloom, when it had nestled against a woman's silken hair.
 
"What is it? What do you mean? Good God, who are you?" said Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, shrinking back as Harriet made the one step necessary to enable her to reach the table.
 
"I am Stewart Routh's wife," she replied, slowly, and without changing her tone, or releasing the other woman from her steady gaze.
 
This time Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge sprang to her feet, with a face as white as death.
 
"Don't be frightened," said Harriet, with the faintest glimmer of a contemptuous smile, which was the last expression having relation to Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge personally, that showed itself in her face, until the end. "I did not come here to inspire you with any fear of me; I did not come here on your account at all, or on mine; but for another motive."
 
"What, what is it?" said her hearer, nervously reseating herself.
 
"My husband's safety," said Harriet; and as she spoke the words, Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge felt that an illusi............