With her eyes fixed on his face, her own slowly whitening until it was blanched, Mollie stood and gazed and gazed.  Hugh Ingelow looked curiously from one to the other.

“In Heaven’s name, Miss Mollie, do you see the Marble Guest, or some invisible familiar, peeping over that fat gentleman’s shoulder?  What do you see?  You look as though you were going to faint.”

“Do you know that gentleman?” she managed to ask.

“Do I know him—­Reverend Raymond Rashleigh?  Better than I know myself, Miss Dane.  When I was a little chap in roundabouts they used to take me to his church every Sunday, and keep me in wriggling torments through a three-hours’ sermon.  Yes, I know him, to my sorrow.”

“He is a clergyman, then?” Mollie said, slowly.

Mr. Ingelow stared at the odd question.

“I have always labored under that impression, Miss Dane, and so does the Reverend Mr. Rashleigh himself, I fancy.  If you choose, I’ll present him, and then you can cross-question him at your leisure.”

“No, no!” cried Mollie, detaining him; “not for the world!  I don’t wish to make his acquaintance.  See, they are filing off!  I fall to your lot, I suppose.”

She took her rejected suitor’s arm—­somehow, she was growing to like to be with Hugh Ingelow—­and they entered the dining-room together.  But Mollie was still very, very pale, and very unusually quiet.

Her face and neck gleamed against her pink dinner-dress like snow, and her eyes wandered furtively ever and anon over to the Reverend Mr. Rashleigh.

She listened to every word that he spoke as though they were the fabled pearls and diamonds of the fairy tale that dropped from his lips.

“Positively, Miss Dane,” Hugh Ingelow remarked in his lazy voice, “it is love at first sight with the Reverend Raymond.  Think better of it, pray; he’s fat and forty, and has one wife already.”

“Hush!” said Mollie, imperiously.

And Mr. Ingelow, stroking his mustache meditatively, hushed, and listened to a story the Reverend Mr. Rashleigh was about to relate.

“So extraordinary a story,” he said, glancing around him, “that I can hardly realize it myself or credit my own senses.  It is the only adventure of my life, and I am free to confess I wish it may remain so.

“It is about three weeks ago.  I was sitting, one stormy night—­Tuesday night it was—­in my study, in after-dinner mood, enjoying the luxury of a good fire and a private clerical cigar, when a young woman—­respectable-looking young person—­entered, and informed me that a sickly relative, from whom I have expectations, was dying, and wished to see me immediately.

“Of course I started up at once, donned hat and greatcoat, and followed my respectable young person into a cab waiting at the door.  Hardly was I in when I was seized by some invisible personage, bound, blindfolded, and gagged, and driven through the starry spheres, for all I know, for hours and hours interminable.