“Yes—­come!  We have Sir Roger Trajenna to-day, and Mr. Walraven detests being kept waiting.”

“Poor Sir Roger!” with a sneering laugh.  “How does the lovesick old dotard bear this second loss?”

“Better than he did the first; his pride aids him.  It is my husband who is like a man distraught.”

“The voice of Nature speaks loudly in the paternal-breast,” said Dr. Oleander. “‘Nater will caper,’ as Ethan Spike says.  Mollie’s mamma must have been a very pretty woman, Blanche.”

Mrs. Walraven’s black eyes snapped; but they were at the dining-room door, and she swept in as your tall, stately women in trailing silks do sweep, bowing to the baronet, and taking her place, and, of course, the subject of the interesting captive down in Long Island was postponed indefinitely.

Dr. Oleander dined and spent the evening at the Walraven palace, and talked about his ward’s second flight with her distressed guardian, and opined she must have gone off to gratify some whim of her own, and laughed in his sleeve at the two anxious faces before him, and departed at ten, mellow with wine and full of hope for the future.

Early next morning Dr. Oleander called round for Susan Sharpe, and found that treasure of nurses ready and waiting.  All through the long drive she sat by his side in his light wagon, never opening her discreet lips except to respond to his questions, and gazing straight ahead through her green glasses into the world of futurity, for all her companion knew.

“Among your charge’s hallucinations,” said Dr. Oleander, just before they arrived, “the chief is that she is not crazy at all.  She will tell you she has been brought here against her will; that I am a tyrant and a villain, and the worst of men; and she will try and bribe you, I dare say, to let her escape.  Of course you will humor her at the time, but pay not the least attention.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Susan Sharpe answered.

There was a pause, then the nurse asked the first question she had put: 

“What is my patient’s name, sir?”

Dr. Oleander paused an instant, and mastered a sudden tremor.  His voice was quite steady when he replied: 

“Miss Dane.  Her friends are eminently respectable, and have the utmost confidence in me.  I have every reason to hope that the quiet of this place and the fresh sea air will eventually effect a cure.”

“I hope so, sir,” Mrs. Susan Sharpe said; and the pink-rimmed eyes glowed behind the green glasses, and into the tallow-candle complexion crept just the faintest tinge of red.

It was an inexpressibly lonely place, as Mrs. Sharpe saw it.  A long stretch of bleak, desolate, windy road, a desolate, salty marsh, ghostly woods, and the wide, dreary sea.  Over all, this afternoon, a sunless sky, threatening rain, and a grim old pile of buildings fronting the sea view.

“A lonesome place,” Mrs. Susan Sharpe said, as if in spite of herself—­“an awfully lonesome place!”