Linda Falconer smiled gently as she listened to the words. She had wished to listen to them for some little while, but she had not been in a hurry. She was too wise, too cold, to allow the young man to think she was in any haste to receive his proposal. But as he had proposed, she was also too wise to allow the opportunity to pass. "But are you sure, quite sure, of your own heart?" she asked, pensively. "You heard what Kathleen Weir said--and--and unless you really love me--" "I do most deeply, most truly; I have thought of this almost ever since I met you, but I was never sure of you; you do not make a rush at a fellow like some women do, and--and though I was afraid I liked you all the better for it." He made this ingenious confession to a woman who knew very well he was speaking the truth. She had intended to win this young lord, and she had won him, and no doubt had done it cleverly. "I was afraid too," she said, softly, "afraid to love you--at least to show my love--but not now." And before the party broke up she had time to whisper her news to Kathleen Weir. "It is all settled," she said; "we are engaged," and her eyes were bright with triumph. Kathleen Weir listened, and somehow another woman's success and happiness gave her a fresh pang. "So this cold, selfish woman has won, and I have lost," she thought, bitterly, after her guests had left her. All her high spirits had now died away; she sat wearily down, but after a while returned to the supper-room and drank several glasses of champagne to benumb the aching pain at her heart. As a rule, she was a very sober woman, and the unusual quantity of wine that she had taken quickly affected her. She walked, but not very steadily, back into the drawing-room, and as she did so her foot tripped on a cushion that someone had accidentally thrown and left on the floor. She stumbled, and to save herself from falling caught hold of a brass floor-lamp, and in doing so overturned it. And in an instant--before her first agonized cry could escape her lips--the burning oil streamed over her bare neck, throat, and arms, and the light dress that she wore was in flames. She uttered shriek after shriek, and ran--a burning mass--to the door of the room. A gentleman who lived in the flat above her heard her cries and quickly came to her assistance. He promptly wrapped her in a coverlet that he caught up, and succeeded, after a few minutes, in crushing out the cruel flames; but she was terribly burned, and the decorated room where the accident occurred, which she had made so bright with flowers when she had awaited Webster's coming, was one blackened ruin ere the fire died out. CHAPTER XLII. WEBSTER'S STRUGGLE. Late in the afternoon of the following day, as Webster was leaving one of the law courts where he had been pleading, a gentleman, a stranger, touched his arm and addressed him. "You are Mr. Webster, the barrister, are you not?" he said. "Yes," answered Webster, looking up.