“Are you actually going to Malines?” asked Dorise of the girl.

“Yes.  As your messenger,” the other replied with a smile.  “I am leaving to-night.  If you care to write him a letter, I will deliver it.”

“Will you come with me over to the Empress Club, and I will write the letter there?” Dorise suggested, still entirely mystified.

To this the stranger agreed, and they left the tea-shop and walked together to the well-known ladies’ club, where, while the mysterious messenger sipped tea, Dorise sat down and wrote a long and affectionate letter to her lover, urging him to exercise the greatest caution and to get back to London as soon as he could.

When she had finished it, she placed it in an envelope.

“I would not address it,” remarked the other girl.  “It will be safer blank, for I shall give it into his hand.”

And ten minute later the mysterious girl departed, leaving Dorise to reflect over the curious encounter.

So Hugh was in Malines.  She went to the telephone, rang up Walter Brock, and told him the reassuring news.

“In Malines?” he cried over the wire.  “I wonder if I dare go there to see him?  What a dead-alive hole!”

Not until then did Dorise recollect that the girl had not given her Hugh’s address.  She had, perhaps, purposely withheld it.

This fact she told Hugh’s friend, who replied over the wire: 

“Well, it is highly satisfactory news, in any case.  We can only wait, Miss Ranscomb.  But this must relieve your mind, I feel sure.”

“Yes, it does,” admitted Dorise, and a few moments later she rang off.

That evening Il Passero’s chic messenger crossed from Dover to Ostend, and next morning she called at Madame Maupoil’s, in Malines, where she delivered Dorise’s note into Hugh’s own hand.  She was an expert and hardened traveller.

Hugh eagerly devoured its contents, for it was the first communication he had had from her since that fateful night at Monte Carlo.  Then, having thanked the girl again, and again, the latter said: 

“If you wish to write back to Miss Ranscomb do so.  I will address the envelope, and as I am going to Cologne to-night I will post it on my arrival.”

Hugh thanked her cordially, and while she sat chatting with Madame Maupoil, sipping her cafe au lait, he sat down and wrote a long letter to the girl he loved so deeply—­a letter which reached its destination four days later.

One morning about ten days afterwards, when the sun shone brightly upon the fresh green of the Surrey hills, Mrs. Bond was sitting before a fire in the pretty morning room at Shapley Manor, a room filled with antique furniture and old blue china, reading an illustrated paper.  At the long, leaded window stood a tall, fair-faced girl in a smart navy-suit.  She was decidedly pretty, with large, soft grey eyes, dimpled cheeks, and a small, well-formed mouth.  She gazed abstractedly out of the window over the beautiful panorama to where Hindhead rose abruptly in the blue distance.  The view from the moss-grown terrace at Shapley, high upon the Hog’s back, was surely one of the finest within a couple of hundred miles of London.