“Hearken, my leddy!” barked old Fraser, “One more word, and I’ll have the gardener put ye off the premises! The girl ye speak of is young and strong. She’ll have just what the Court gives her, and what her father laid out for her, and I’ll work my will, and I’ll do his will. Ye’re speaking to no fule, here now! Take yere money and yere letters, and bring me the maid, or I’ll bundle ye both in a jiffey into the Queen’s highway. I’ll have none but my own servants here--now!” Then Justine Delande, without another word, stepped forward, and, seizing the pen, signed her receipt for wages due, in silence. She defiantly gathered up her withheld letters and papers. She returned in a few moments with the maid, whose ox-like eyes glowed in the sudden joy of a return to Switzerland. For the ranz des vaches was now ringing in the stout peasant girl’s ears. “There, that’s all, now!” rasped the old man, when the maid had gathered up her dole. “The butler will go down to town with ye and see ye safe, and he will leave word at the bank to pay yere checks. I keep no siller here. It’s a lonely house.” And the dead tyrant worked his will through the living one, as his stony heart had laid out the future. Justine Delande faced the old miser pedant as she indignantly cried: “God protect and keep the poor orphan who has drifted out of one hell on earth into another! Your dead brother robbed her of a mother’s love, and you--you old vampire--you would bury her alive! She shall know yet her dead mother’s love, and--her brutal father’s shame!” Before the excited woman could select another period of flowing invective from her thronging emotions, the gaunt old scholar had pushed her out into the hall and slid a bolt upon his door, with a vicious click. There were certain qualms of fear already unsettling his triumphant calmness. While Justine Delande, with flaming cheeks, sprang up the stair, and barricaded herself with the sobbing heiress, the old man, his eyes gleaming with all the conscious pride of tyranny, seated himself and indited a note directed to PROFESSOR ALARIC HOBBS, (of Waukesha University, U. S. A.), ROYAL VICTORIA HOTEL, ST. HELIERS, JERSEY. He had already dismissed from his mind the sorrows of the orphaned niece--he cared not for the spirited onslaught of the Swiss woman--and he rejoiced in his heart at the fact of Douglas Fraser’s departure to gather up the loose ends of his dead brother’s great fortune. “It’s a vixenish baggage--this Swiss teacher! Hugh was right to bid me cut those cords at once and forever between them! The girl shall have discipline, and, that baggage, her mother, is well out of the world! I’ll work Hugh’s will! She shall come under!” With a secret glee he ran over a schedule of chapter headings upon Thibet, Tibet, Tubet--the land of Bod--Bodyul or Alassa. He was drifting back into the dreamland of the pedant, but a few hours deserted.