The sojourn was at a quiet little hotel in a Gloucestershire town that it is unnecessary to name; suffice it if we say that, save on the weekly market-day, the streets, with two exceptions, were silent and deserted; the two exceptions being the time when the children were set free from the National Schools. Hence, then, any little noise or excitement was unusual, and it was no wonder that Max Bray was startled by a scream above stairs, a cry for help, and the trampling of feet; sounds which his coward heart soon interpreted for him to mean an awful termination to his "stratagem," when, rising hurriedly to his feet, he stood there resting one hand upon the table, and the cold perspiration standing in great drops upon his pallid face. There were people coming towards his room--they were coming to tell him. "What of it, then?" he cried savagely. "Could he help it? Had no doctor been obtained? It was her own mad excitement led to this termination." "O, sir! O, sir!" exclaimed the landlady, bursting tearful-eyed into the room, "your poor, dear, sweet lady!" "Dead?" asked Max in a harsh whisper, his knees shaking beneath him as he spoke. "No, sir, not dead. I only left her for a few minutes, and when I came back--" "Well, what? Speak, woman!" cried Max fiercely. "She was gone, sir." Max Bray stood for a minute as if stunned, and then leaping at the woman he shook her savagely, before he started off to make inquiries. "Had anyone seen her?" "No, not a soul." But her clothes that she had worn the day she was borne insensible to the hotel were gone, as was also her little leather reticule-bag. "Where could she have gone?" Only one place could strike Max Bray, as he thought of what she would do if sense had returned, and she had mastered her weakness sufficiently to enable her to steal from the house unobserved. There was only one place that she could seek with the intention of fleeing from him, and that was the railway station. "Was their life to be bound up somehow with railways?" he asked himself as he started off in the direction of the station. "Bai Jove!" he seemed to have been always either meeting or inquiring about her at booking-offices; but why had she not been better watched? Why indeed, unless it was that a chance might be given her for seeking freedom. But the landlady's few minutes had been a full hour, and, as if in her sleep, Ella had slowly risen, dressed for a journey, taken her reticule in her hand, her shawl over her arm, and then, drawing down her veil, walked--unseen, unchallenged--from the house, and, as if guided by instinct, gone straight to the station. A train was nearly due--a fast train--and still in the same quiet way she applied for a through ticket to London, took her change and walked out on to the platform, to stand there perfectly motionless and fixed of eye.