She was seated in a wide, low chair near the sunny window, half hid by the leafy plants that grew in the boxes there.  She was clad in loose morning wear over ample crinoline, her dark hair drawn in broad bands over the temples, half confined by a broad gold comb, save two long curls which hung down her neck at either side.  It seemed to me she was very thin—­thinner and darker than ever.  Under her wide eyes were heavy circles.  She held out her hand to me, and it lay cold and lifeless in my own.  I made some pleasant talk of small matters as I might, and soon as I could arrived at the business of the letter I had received.

“Perhaps I have been a little hurried, after all, in classing myself as an absolute pauper,” I explained as she read.  “You see, I must go out there and look into these things.”

“Going away again?” She looked up at me, startled.

“For a couple of weeks.  And when I come back, Miss Grace—­”

So now I was up to the verge of that same old, definite question.

She sat up in the chair as though pulling herself together in some sudden resolve, and looked me straight in the face.

“Jack,” she said, “why should we wait?”

“To be sure,” said I.  “Only I do not want you to marry a pauper if any act of my own can make him better than a pauper in the meantime.”

“You temporize,” she said, bitterly.  “You are not glad.  Yet you came to me only last spring, and you—­”

“I come to you now, Miss Grace,” I said.

“Ah, what a difference between then and now!” she sighed.

For a time we could find nothing fit to say.  At last I was forced to bring up one thing I did not like to mention.

“Miss Grace,” said I, seating myself beside her, “last night, or rather this morning, after midnight, I found a man prowling around in the yard.”

She sprang up as though shocked, her face gray, her eyes full of terror.

“You have told!” she exclaimed, “My father knows that Captain Orme—­”

It was my own turn to feel surprise, which perhaps I showed.

“I have told no one.  It seemed to me that first I ought to come to you and ask you about this.  Why was Orme there?”

She stared at me.  “He told me he would come back some time,” she admitted at length.  All the while she was fighting with herself, striving, exactly as Orme had done, to husband her powers for an impending struggle.  “You see,” she added, “he has secret business all over the country—­I will own I believe him to be in the secret service of the inner circle of a number of Southern congressmen and business men.  He is in with the Southern circle—­of New Orleans, of Charleston—­Washington.  For this reason he could not always choose his hours of going and coming.”

“Does your father know of his peculiar hours?”

“I presume so, of course.”

“I saw a light at a window,” I began, “whose window I do not know, doubtless some servant’s.  It could not have been a signal?”