“What?”

Sir Everard laughed.

“Such a mystified face, mother!  Oh; it’s highly sensational and melodramatic, I promise you!  Sit down and hear the sequel.”

And then, eloquently and persuasively, Sir Everard repeated Miss Sybilla Silver’s extraordinary story, and Lady Kingsland was properly shocked.

“Disguised herself in men’s clothes!  My dear Everard, what a dreadful creature she must be!”

“Not at all dreadful, mother.  She is as sensitive and womanly a young lady as ever I saw in my life.  And, she’s a very pretty girl, too.”

Lady Kingsland looked suspiciously at her son.  She highly disapproved of pretty girls where he was concerned; but the handsome face was frank and open as the day.

“Now don’t be suspicious, Lady Kingsland.  I’m not going to fall in love with Miss Sybilla Silver, I give you my word and honor.  She saved my life, remember.  May I not fetch her here?”

“What! in men’s clothes, and before your sister?  Everard, how dare you?”

Sir Everard broke into a peal of boyish laughter that made the room ring.

“I don’t believe she’s in men’s clothes!” exclaimed Mildred, suddenly.  “Honorine told me robbers must have been in my dressing-room last night—­half my things were stolen.  I understand it now—­Everard was the robber.”

“I am going for her, mother.  Remember she is friendless, and that she saved your son’s life.”

He quitted the room with the last word.  That claim, he knew, was one his mother would never repudiate.

“Oh!” she said, lying back in her chair pale and faint, “to think what might have happened!”

As she spoke her son re-entered the room, and by his side a young lady—­so stately, so majestic in her dark beauty, that involuntarily the mother and daughter arose.

“My mother, this young lady saved my life.  Try and thank her for me.  Lady Kingsland, Miss Silver.”

Surely some subtle power of fascination invested this dark daughter of the earth.  The liquid dark eyes lifted themselves in mute appeal to the great lady’s face, and then the proudest woman in England opened her arms with a sudden impulse and took the outcast to her bosom.

“I can never thank you,” she murmured.  “The service you have rendered me is beyond all words.”

An hour later Sybilla went slowly back to her room.  She had breakfasted tete-a-tete with my lady and her daughter, while Sir Everard, in scarlet coat and cord and tops, had mounted his bonny bay and ridden off to Lady Louise and the fox-hunt, and to his fate, though he knew it not.

“Really, Mildred,” my lady said, “a most delightful young person, truly.  Do you know, if she does not succeed in finding her friends I should like to retain her as a companion?”

In her own room Sybilla Silver stood before the glass, and she smiled back at her own image.