To be dashing along the lighted streets to meet the absconded swindler who had dared to take advantage of her girlish folly to make her his wife by law, was delirious work. Cowering back in the corner of the hansom, she gazed with sickened misery at the gay shop-windows, at the crowded omnibuses, at the cheery passengers who carelessly stepped along the pavement, looking as if all life were matter-of-fact, plain sailing, "above-board." A hundred shrill voices seemed clamouring in her ears--"turn back--turn back! Face the worst, but be honest!" She had almost flung up her arm and, opening the trap, bid the driver return, when the memory of Vansittart--of his love--of his kiss--came surging upon her with redoubled force. "If I am a coward, I shall lose him!" cried her whole nature, fiercely. No! She must battle through: she must circumvent her enemy--the enemy to her love, and Vansittart’s. But how? "I will dare him," was her instinct. "I will tell him to claim me if he can!" But that was the madness of passion. Reason bade her use other means. "One must fight a man with his own weapons," she told herself, as the hansom dashed along Gloucester Place, and she knew her time was short. It was now nearer nine than eight--she had seen that by an illuminated clock over a shop. _He_ was to be at their trysting-place of old, when she had lodged with her old nurse in a street in Camden Town, at eight. "He lied to me from the first moment to the last. I must lie to him. I will pretend I have cared for him! It will put him off his guard," she thought, as, with a double fee to the cabman, who said "thank-ye, miss," with odious familiarity, she scurried away in the darkness, and crossing the wet road, turned up that which led to the Inner Circle. There was no chance of forgetting the spot where they two had last met! As she neared it, a slim, dark figure stepped out from the shadow. "My wife," he exclaimed, in emotional tones. He would have embraced her, but she slipped away and leant up against the paling. "You can call me that--after leaving me all these years--not knowing whether you were alive or dead," she panted hoarsely. Under any circumstances emotion was natural, so she made no effort to conceal it. "I? It was you who would not reply to my letters!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I wrote again and again, under cover to your miserable old nurse--and don’t say you never had them! The last came back to me--’not known.’ But the others did not--they would have if they had not reached!" "If she had them, she never gave them to me!" she said truthfully. "And I don’t wonder! I was so utterly wretched when I read of your--your--flight--that I told her--all! I had to--I should have gone raving mad if I had kept it to myself!"