Joan made her way home--how, she hardly knew. In the confusion of thought succeeding that terrible interview which had successfully shown her she was in the power of a merciless tyrant, instinct guided her. After Victor Mercier had put her into a cab, and she had alighted from it in a thoroughfare near her uncle’s house, she let herself in with the latchkey she had playfully annexed, little dreaming how she would need to use it--and meeting no one as she made her way up to her room, locked herself in to face her misery alone. As she tossed and writhed through the long, miserable night she almost despaired. Perhaps she would have utterly and entirely lost heart, had not a thought flashed upon her mind--an idea she welcomed as an inspiration. "There is only one way to escape the grip of that savage tiger--flight!" she told herself. Although the sole tie between them was the hasty ceremony in a Registrar’s office he had cajoled her into years ago--although she had met him but once afterwards before he absconded and disappeared, and that was in the very spot where their interview a few hours before had taken place, she believed, indeed she knew, that for her to try to undo that knot would entail publicity--disgrace--even shame--that if she endured the ordeal, she would emerge unfit to be Vansittart’s wife. If _he_ forgave her, even her uncle--society could and would never overlook the smirch upon her fair girlhood. She would bear a brand. "Victor gave me the idea, himself," she told herself, with a bitter smile at the irony of the fact. "He--the man who is legally my husband until he chooses to renounce me"--in her ignorance of the law she fancied that Victor Mercier might divorce her quietly in some way, if he pleased--"proposed that we should disappear together, and frighten my uncle into a concession. What if I disappeared alone--and only allowed one person to find me--Vansittart?" That Vansittart loved her passionately, with all the fervour and intensity of a strong, virile nature, she knew. Whether the love was mad enough to fall in with any wildly romantic proceeding, she had yet to discover. "He will seek me as soon as he can!" she correctly thought. As she was crossing the hall after breakfasting with her uncle, who--in his hopes that his only niece and adopted daughter and heiress was thinking better of her aloofness to mankind, and melting in regard to his favourite among her many admirers, Lord Vansittart--had been unwontedly urbane and affectionate, a telegram was brought to her. "If I may see you at twelve, noon, do not reply.--Vansittart." At noon her uncle would be at his club, and her aunt had, she knew, an appointment with her dressmaker in Bond Street. She went to her room and spent some little time in deciding upon her toilette. How did she look best, or, rather, how should she be attired to appeal most strongly to Vansittart’s imagination and senses?