Then he went on to give me more particulars of the _escapade_. It seems that Miss Raymond had gone out to walk alone, after luncheon, and that nothing more was heard of her till dinner-time, when a note was found on her dressing-table, addressed to her aunt, containing the intelligence of her flight with Forrester, and a little piece of ready-made penitence--the first for all whom it might concern, the second for her father. That placid Lord Ullin received the news by telegraph when he was well into his second rubber at the "Travelers;" he put the message into his pocket without remark, and won the rubber before he rose. It has been reported that he was somewhat absent during its progress, so much so as to rough his partner's strongest suit; but this I conceive to have been an after-thought of some one's, or a _canard_ of the club. Impavid as the Horatian model-man--(just in all his _dealings_, and tenacious of the odd trick)--I can not imagine the convulsion of nature which would have made him jeopardize by any sin of omission or commission the winning of the long odds. He found Bruce that night, and told him all. He never would give an account of that interview: it must have been a curious one. _"xunomosan gar, ontes echtistoi to prin, pur kai thalassa--"_ Fancy the well-iced conventionalities of the one brought in contact with the other's savage temperament, maddened by baffled desires and the sense of shameful defeat. Before noon the next day it was announced to Lady Catharine, at Kerton Manor, that Bruce was waiting for her in the drawing-room. It was with a diffidence and sense of guilt very strange to her pure, straightforward nature that she obeyed the summons. His back was to the door as she entered. "I can not tell you how sorry I am," she began. Bruce turned toward her his ghastly face, ravaged and deformed by passion and sleeplessness, like a cane-brake in the Western Indies over which a tornado has passed. He did not appear to notice her words or her offered hand, but spoke in a strange, broken voice, after clearing his parched throat once or twice, huskily: "When did they go? At what hour?" She told him as well as she could. "Where have they gone to?" "I have not the least idea. Bella gave no hint of this. Would you like to see her note?" and she held it out to him. The name appeared to sting him like the cut of a whip, for he started convulsively as he took the scrap of paper. He read it through more than once, as if unable to comprehend it; the power of discrimination seemed blasted in his dry, red eyeballs; they could only glare. He made it out at last, and crumpled it up in his hand, clenching it till the knuckles became dead-white under the strain. "We were to have been married this day month," he said to himself, in a hoarse whisper; then raising his voice, "You can guess, at least, which route they have taken?"