“Ah!  Bruce”—­Guy replied; “I should be very glad if I knew what he was doing at this moment.  I have been expecting him every day; but nothing has been heard of him since he left my mother’s presence in a rabid state of fury.  Did I tell you it was from Kerton they fled?  I thought he must have come to me for an explanation, knowing that I was an accessory before the fact.  Indeed, I lent Charley the sinews of war in the shape of a blank check, which I see this morning he has filled up for a thousand—­just like his modesty.  Well, I hope they’ll amuse themselves!  Bruce has never been near me.  Suicide is the most charitable suggestion I’ve heard yet; but coroners are silent, and the Thames, if it is conscious of that unlucky though disagreeable man, keeps his secret so far!”

Then he went on to give me more particulars of the escapade.  It seems that Miss Raymond had gone out to walk alone, after luncheon, and that nothing more was heard of her till dinner-time, when a note was found on her dressing-table, addressed to her aunt, containing the intelligence of her flight with Forrester, and a little piece of ready-made penitence—­the first for all whom it might concern, the second for her father.

That placid Lord Ullin received the news by telegraph when he was well into his second rubber at the “Travelers;” he put the message into his pocket without remark, and won the rubber before he rose.  It has been reported that he was somewhat absent during its progress, so much so as to rough his partner’s strongest suit; but this I conceive to have been an after-thought of some one’s, or a canard of the club.  Impavid as the Horatian model-man—­(just in all his dealings, and tenacious of the odd trick)—­I can not imagine the convulsion of nature which would have made him jeopardize by any sin of omission or commission the winning of the long odds.

He found Bruce that night, and told him all.  He never would give an account of that interview:  it must have been a curious one.

     "xunomosan gar, ontes echtistoi to prin,
     pur kai thalassa—­“

Fancy the well-iced conventionalities of the one brought in contact with the other’s savage temperament, maddened by baffled desires and the sense of shameful defeat.

Before noon the next day it was announced to Lady Catharine, at Kerton Manor, that Bruce was waiting for her in the drawing-room.  It was with a diffidence and sense of guilt very strange to her pure, straightforward nature that she obeyed the summons.

His back was to the door as she entered.

“I can not tell you how sorry I am,” she began.

Bruce turned toward her his ghastly face, ravaged and deformed by passion and sleeplessness, like a cane-brake in the Western Indies over which a tornado has passed.  He did not appear to notice her words or her offered hand, but spoke in a strange, broken voice, after clearing his parched throat once or twice, huskily: