“Yes, I understand extradition provisions have been arranged, which are bound to have a wholesome effect; especially in this section, where it is so easy to slip across the lakes any dark night.  I am told nearly all felonies will be embraced now—­from murder to burglary—­and that Her Majesty’s Secretaries are more willing to aid our officers, than was the case a few years ago, when no end of quibbling tied up justice.”

The gentlemen on the seat in front of her, moved away to the smoking car; and the woman in gray listened to the creak and whirr of the wheel of torturing dread, upon which some malignant fate once more bound her.  Bertie had been safe in his mountain fastness, until her ill-starred advertisement coaxed him within reach of the police Briareus.  Could she discern the hand of merciful warning in this fortuitous meeting with a captured culprit; which so vividly recalled the maddening incidents of her return to X—–­, when the sheriff had hurried her from the car?  A sickening terror seized her, and along the expanse of pearly mist that united earth and sky, in tke snowy fringe of ripples breaking their teeth on the shelving beach, she seemed to read the doom of her stratagem written in words of menace: 

“Go where you may, but I give you fair warning you cannot escape me; and the day on which you meet that guilty vagabond, you betray him to the scouts of justice.”

Far away, among the orange groves of Louisiana, would he forget his threat, or fail to execute it?  On and on darted the train; people laughed and talked; a tired baby swayed from side to side on the nurse’s knees, crooned herself to sleep; and a canary in a cage covered with pink net, broke suddenly into a spasm of trills and roulades.

It was almost four o’clock when the dull roar of Niagara set the air a tremble, and the few remaining passengers left the train.  The little town was unusually quiet and deserted, the tide of summer travel having ebbed; and not until the crystal fingers of the ice fairy had built her wonderful Giralda out of foam and spray, would that of Winter tourists begin to flow.

Leaving her trunk at the “baggage room” of the station, Beryl engaged a carriage driver to take her to the Suspension Bridge.  Drawing her gray bonnet and veil as far as possible over her face, she paid the toll, and noticed that the keeper peered curiously at her, and muttered something in an undertone to a man wearing a uniform, who turned and stared at her.

She hurried away along that iron mesh swinging high in air like a vast spider web, spun from shore to shore across the swirling, snarling caldron of hissing waters.  Was the officer the wary spider watching her movements, waiting to slip down the metal snare, and devour her hopes?  Her heart beats sounded as the heavy thuds of a drum; the rush of dire forebodings drowned even the roar of the Falls, and the magnificence of the spectacle vanished before the awful realization of the danger to which she had invited Bertie.