A nameless dread was clutching at his heart-strings. What could she mean? he asked himself, confusedly. What did this foul mystery mean? He must know, or he would go mad! "You may speak out unreservedly, Miss Pluma," he said, hoarsely. "I give you my word, as a gentleman, I shall not interrupt you, even though your words should cause me a bitter heart-pang." He stood before her, his arms folded across his breast, yet no pang of remorse crept into Pluma Hurlhurst's relentless heart for the cruel blow she was about to deal him. "I must begin at the time of the lawn fête," she said. "That morning a woman begged to see me, sobbing so piteously I could not refuse her an audience. No power of words could portray the sad story of suffering and wrong she poured into my ears, of a niece--beautiful, young, passionate, and willful--and of her prayers and useless expostulations, and of a handsome, dissolute lover to whom the girl was passionately attached, and of elopements she had frustrated, alas! more than once. Ah! how shall I say it!--the lover was not a marrying man." Pluma stopped short, and hid her face again in her kerchief as if in utter confusion. "Go on--go on!" cried Rex, hoarsely. "'Lend me money,' cried the woman, 'that I may protect the girl by sending her off to school at once. Kind lady, she is young, like you, and I beg you on my knees!' I gave the woman the required amount, and the girl was taken to school the very next day. But the end was not there. The lover followed the girl--there must have been a preconcerted plan between them--and on the morning after she had entered school she fled from it--fled with her lover. That lover was Lester Stanwick--gay, fascinating, perfidious Lester--whom you know but too well. Can you not guess who the girl was, Rex?" The dark eyes regarding her were frozen with horror, his white lips moved, but no sound issued from them. She leaned nearer to him, her dark, perfumed hair swept across his face as she whispered, with startling effect: "The girl was Daisy Brooks, and she is at this moment in company with her lover! Heaven pity you, Rex; you must learn to forget her." CHAPTER XI. When Daisy Brooks opened her eyes, she found herself lying on a white bed, and in a strange apartment which she never remembered having seen before. For one brief instant she quite imagined the terrible ordeal through which she had passed was but a dream. Then it all came back to her with cruel distinctness. "Where am I?" she cried, struggling up to a sitting posture, and putting back the tangled golden hair from her face. "How came I here? Who saved me from the terrible dark water?" "I did," answered a young man, rising from his seat by the open window. "I saved your life at the risk of my own. Look up into my face, Daisy, and see if you do not remember me." She lifted her blue eyes to the dark, handsome, smiling face before her. Yes, she had seen that face before, but she could not remember where.