“Miss Brabazon is here, now, at Wyndfell Hall,” exclaimed Blanche.  “You must have heard of her, Mark?  She’s the owner of some tremendously big city business.”

“Oh, I don’t think it can be that girl!”

Mark Gifford looked surprised and perturbed.

“But I know it’s that girl.  She’s become quite a friend of mine, and of Bubbles.  Oh, Mark, I do hope Helen Brabazon won’t be brought into this dreadful business—­d’you think that will be really necessary?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly.  “But some of our people think that Varick may put up a fight.  British criminal law is much too kind to murderers.  Even if there’s evidence enough to hang a man ten times over, there’s always a sporting chance he may get off!  There is in this case.”

Blanche turned suddenly very pale.  The full realization of what those words meant rushed upon her.  He feared she was going to faint.

“Forgive me,” she muttered.  “It’s stupid, I know; but you must remember that—­that I’ve known Lionel Varick a long time.”

“I’m not a bit surprised that you are so distressed,” he said soothingly.

And then something happened which did surprise Mark Gifford!  He was supposed to be a clever, intelligent man, and there were many people who went in awe of him; but he knew very little about women.  This, perhaps, was why he felt utterly astounded when Blanche suddenly burst into tears, and began rocking herself backwards and forwards.  “Oh, Mark!” she sobbed.  “Oh, Mark, I’m so unhappy,—­I’m so miserable—­I’m so frightened.  Do—­do help me!”

“That’s just what I came to do,” he said simply.  But he was very much troubled.  Her face was full of a kind of agonized appeal....

Greatly daring, he bent down over her, and gathered her into his arms.

She clung to him convulsively; and, all at once, there came insistently to Mark Gifford, George Herbert’s beautiful saying:  “There is an hour in which a man may be happy all his life, can he but find it.”  Perhaps that hour, that moment, had come to him now.

“Blanche,” he whispered, “Blanche—­darling!  You didn’t really mean what you wrote yesterday?  Don’t you think the time has come when two such old friends as you and I might—­”

“—­make fools of themselves?”

She looked up at him, and there came a quivering smile over her disfigured face.  “Yes, if you really wish it, Mark.  I’ll do just as you like.”

“D’you really mean that?” he asked.

And she said firmly:  “Yes, Mark—­I really do mean it.”  And he felt her yielding—­yielding in spirit as well as in body—­in body as well as in spirit.

“I suppose you couldn’t come back with me to London, now?” he asked a little shyly.  “We could get the woman at the post office down there to send up a letter to Bubbles, explaining that you had to go away unexpectedly, and telling her to follow you to town to-day.”