What course am I to take under these circumstances?  Having got her secret, what am I to do with it?  These are awkward considerations; I am rather puzzled how to deal with them.

It is something more than the mere fact of her choosing to disguise herself to forward her own private ends that causes my present perplexity.  Hundreds of girls take fancies for disguising themselves; and hundreds of instances of it are related year after year in the public journals.  But my ex-pupil is not to be confounded for one moment with the average adventuress of the newspapers.  She is capable of going a long way beyond the limit of dressing herself like a man, and imitating a man’s voice and manner.  She has a natural gift for assuming characters which I have never seen equaled by a woman; and she has performed in public until she has felt her own power, and trained her talent for disguising herself to the highest pitch.  A girl who takes the sharpest people unawares by using such a capacity as this to help her own objects in private life, and who sharpens that capacity by a determination to fight her way to her own purpose, which has beaten down everything before it, up to this time—­is a girl who tries an experiment in deception, new enough and dangerous enough to lead, one way or the other, to very serious results.  This is my conviction, founded on a large experience in the art of imposing on my fellow-creatures.  I say of my fair relative’s enterprise what I never said or thought of it till I introduced myself to the inside of her box.  The chances for and against her winning the fight for her lost fortune are now so evenly balanced that I cannot for the life of me see on which side the scale inclines.  All I can discern is, that it will, to a dead certainty, turn one way or the other on the day when she passes Noel Vanstone’s doors in disguise.

Which way do my interests point now?  Upon my honor, I don’t know.

Five o’clock.—­I have effected a masterly compromise; I have decided on turning myself into a Jack-o n-both-sides.

By to-day’s post I have dispatched to London an anonymous letter for M r.  Noel Vanstone.  It will be forwarded to its destination by the same means which I successfully adopted to mystify Mr. Pendril; and it will reach Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth, by the afternoon of to-morrow at the latest.

The letter is short, and to the purpose.  It warns Mr. Noel Vanstone, in the most alarming language, that he is destined to become the victim of a conspiracy; and that the prime mover of it is a young lady who has already held written communication with his father and himself.  It offers him the information necessary to secure his own safety, on condition that he makes it worth the writer’s while to run the serious personal risk which such a disclosure will entail on him.  And it ends by stipulating that the answer shall be advertised in the Times; shall be addressed to “An Unknown Friend”; and shall state plainly what remuneration Mr. Noel Vanstone offers for the priceless service which it is proposed to render him.