"Dare!" and he laughed. "What is there to dare? Come, my lady! It is not my fault if you remain in ignorance of the nature of the man you are dealing with. Work with me and I will serve you, desert me--for it would be desertion--and I will thwart you. Which is it to be? You will write and send the note!" She moved her hand. "What else?" A gleam of triumph shot from his small eyes. He thought for a moment. "Only this" he said, "and it is your welfare that I am now thinking of. When Lord Leycester returns from his fruitless errand, he will be in a fit state for consolation. You can give it to him. I have greatly over-rated the ingenuity and tact of Lady Lenore Beauchamp if that tact and ingenuity does not enable her to bring Lord Leycester Wyndward to her feet before the month has passed." Pale and humiliated, but still meeting his sneering contemptuous gaze with steadfast eyes, she inclined her head. "Is that all?" "That is all," he said. "I can rely on you. Yes, I think--I am sure I can. After all, our interests are mutual!" She gathered her shawl round her, and moved toward the path. He raised his hat. "When next we meet, Lady Lenore, it will be as strangers who have nothing in common. The past will have been wiped out from both our minds and our lives. I shall be the chosen husband of Stella Etheridge and you will be the Lady Trevor and future Countess of Wyndward. I never prophesy in vain, my lady; I never prophesied more confidently than I do now. Good-night." She did not return his greeting--scarcely looked at him, but glided quietly into the darkness. CHAPTER XXVII. Sleep kept afar off from Stella's eyelids that night. The momentous morrow loomed before her, at one moment filling her with a nameless dread, at another suffusing her whole being with an equally nameless ecstasy. Could it be possible that to-morrow--in a few hours--she would be Leycester's wife? There was enough in the reflection to banish sleep for a week. Let us do her justice. Love and not ambition was the sentiment that moved and agitated her. It was not the thought of the title and the wealth which awaited her, not the future Wyndward coronet which set her trembling and her heart throbbing, but the reflection that Leycester, her lover, her ideal of all that was great and noble, and manfully beautiful, would be her own, all her own. At an early hour she heard Frank wandering up and down outside her door, and at last he knocked. "Are you getting up, Stel?" he asked, in a whisper. Stella opened the door and stood before him in her plain stuff dress, which Frank was wont to declare became her better than the satins and silks of a duchess, and he looked up at her with an admiring nod. "That's right!" he said. "I've been up ages. I've taken my bag and hidden it in the lane. Is yours ready?" She gave him a small handbag--gave it with a certain reluctance that hung about her still; but he took it eagerly.