of sisterhood and mutual confidence; yet the coloured lights of the station were already visible, and the fly was turning into its gravelled area, ere Mrs. Lascelles could divine with any certainty the place her companion had lately quitted.

"What a long drive it is, to be sure!" observed the latter wearily. "And they call it only five miles to Midcombe Junction from Blackgrove!"

Mrs. Lascelles felt her heart give a jump, and she caught her breath.

"From Blackgrove!" she repeated. "Do you know Sir Henry Hallaton?"

"I do know Sir Henry," replied the other with emphasis. "I know him thoroughly!"

CHAPTER II.

AN ALLIANCE.

In the boudoir of a dear little house, just far enough off Piccadilly to be out of the roar of its carriages, sat Mrs. Lascelles, "waiting luncheon," as she called it, for her travelling companion of the day before.

The ladies had been so charmed with each other in their railway journey the previous evening, that an invitation to the pleasantest of all meals was given, and accepted with great cordiality, before they parted; and the mistress of No. 40, as she loved to designate it, was glad to think that her pretty home should look its best for the reception of this new friend. A canary was perched in the window, a fire blazed in the grate, a pug-dog was snoring happily on the rug, a bullfinch swelling in splendid sulks on the work-table: with a peal at the door bell this simple machinery seemed all set in motion at once—the canary twittered, the pug barked, the bullfinch subsided, Mrs. Lascelles jumped up, the door opened, and a footman announced "Miss Ross!"

If Miss Ross looked well under the dim light of a railway carriage, she lost nothing of her prestige when exposed to the full glare of day. She was pale, certainly, and perhaps a little too thin, but her black eyes were certainly splendid; while over her rather irregular features and her too resolute mouth and chin was cast a wild, mournful expression, half pathetic, half defiant, expressly calculated, it would seem, for the subjugation of mankind, especially that portion who have outlived the fresher and more healthy tastes of youth; add to this, masses of black hair, a little bonnet with a scarlet flower, a graceful figure, lithe as a panther's, clad in a dark but very becoming dress, and I submit that the general effect of such an arrival fully justified the disturbance it created in the boudoir at No. 40.

Mrs. Lascelles, it is needless to observe, took in all these details at a glance,—she had "reckoned up" her visitor, as the Yankees say, long before she let go the hands she clasped in both her own with so cordial a welcome.

"This woman," thought she, "would be a formidable enemy. I wonder whether she might not also prove a valuable friend."

Then, sharp and cold, shot through her the misgiving of the day before; what had she been doing at Blackgrove, this dark-eyed girl, and what did she know of Sir Henry Hallaton? No stone would she leave unturned till she found out.

Miss Ross, however, did not seem at all a mysterious person, at least on the surface.

Before she had taken off her bonnet and made friends with the pug, she had already broached the subject nearest the other's heart.

"You are very kind to me, Mrs. Lascelles," she said, folding the pug's ears back with her white, well-shaped hands; "but I must not come into your house and waste your substance under false colours. Do I look like an adventurer, adventuress,—what do you call it?—a person who lives from hand to mouth, who has no settled abode,—a sort of decently-dressed vagrant, not exactly starving, but barely respectable? Because that's what I am!"

Mrs. Lascelles stared, and called her dog away.

"I went to Blackgrove as an adventuress," continued Miss Ross, in calm, placid tones, with no appearance of earnestness but in the firm lines round her mouth, "I left it as an adventuress. I can hold my own anywhere, and with any one; but I should have been worse than I am had I stayed a day longer in that house!"

"Tell me about it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lascelles eagerly. "I am sure you are not—not—at all the sort of person I shouldn't like to know."

"I will tell you," said the other, speaking lower and faster now, with a bright gleam in her black eyes. "I haven't a friend in the world—I never did have a woman friend; if I had—well, it's no use thinking of that now. Never mind; I'll tell you every thing, because—because I fancy I can guess something, and you ought to know. Have you ever seen Miss Hallaton, Helen Hallaton?—a girl with black eye-brows, and a face like an old Greek bas-relief. Well, I was to be Helen's companion;—does that surprise you? If you were a widower, Mrs. Lascelles, and had daughters, am I the sort of person you would engage as their companion?"

It was a difficult question. From the widower's point of view, Mrs. Lascelles was not quite sure but she would. Miss Ross, however, went on without waiting for an answer.

"Shall I tell you how I lived before I ever thought of being anybody's companion? Shall I tell you all I learned in a school at Dieppe, in a convent at Paris, amongst the strange people who struggle on for bare existence in the foreign quarter of London? I have sat for a model at half a crown an hour; I have sung in a music-hall at half-a-guinea a night. I suppose it was my own fault that I was born without a home, without a position, without parents, as I sometimes think,—certainly without a conscience and without a heart! Yet I know hundreds who have been twice as bad as I ever was, without half my excuses. Mrs. Lascelles, I have been at war with most of my own sex and the whole of the other ever since the days of short frocks and a skipping-rope. Don't you think I must sometimes long to sit down and rest, to leave off being a she-Arab, if only for half an hour?"

"Was that why you went to Blackgrove?" asked the other, wondering, interested, a little frightened, yet also a little fascinated, by her guest.

"I was in London with a capital of three pounds seventeen shillings," laughed Miss Ross, "and a personalty of five dresses, two bracelets, and Alfred de Musset's poems half-bound, the morning I answered the advertisement that took me to Blackgrove. Can you believe that when I left it yesterday, I might have stayed, if I had chosen, as mistress of the house, the flower garden, the whole establishment, and wife of the worst—well, one of the worst men I have ever had to do with? For a moment I hesitated—I own I hesitated; though I knew her so little, I could almost have done it for Helen's sake. Mrs. Lascelles, that girl is an angel, and her father is—is—not to use strong language—quite the reverse."

Mrs. Lascelles was woman enough to defend an absent friend, and the colour rose to her brow while she thought how confidentially they were riding together along the Bragford road not twenty-four hours ago.

"I have known Sir Henry some time," she said, drawing herself up, and blushing yet deeper to reflect that the "some time" was but a very few weeks after all; "I cannot believe him what you describe. You ought not to say such things if you have no proof of them."

"It was to prove them I came here to-day," replied Miss Ross. "It was to prevent a bad man from making a fool of another woman as he has tried to make a fool of me. Plain speaking, Mrs. Lascelles, but listen to my story before you ring the bell for the footman to turn me out of the house. The first fortnight I was at Blackgrove I never saw the papa at all; and I honestly own I was becoming every day more attached to the eldest girl. It was a quiet, peaceful life; and what with the country air, the sleep, the fresh butter and cream, I began to feel quite strong and healthy. Sometimes I thought I was even getting gentle and almost good; I do believe I could have lived there with Helen,