“You won’t quite forget me, though you won’t let me tell you my name,” he said more earnestly than he knew, for her strange beauty, her strange manner, had gone a little to his head. Ismay turned to him as the hansom stopped at her mother’s door, and looked once more at his strong, sweet face and broad shoulders. “No! I will not forget you,” she said, with her delicate smile that was so much older than her manner. “And when I meet you again--remember, you must be glad to see me.” “Shall I knock for you?” he asked, helping her out. “Knock? Oh, no!” Last night she would have been afraid to go out secretly and come back openly with an utter stranger, but now there was a lightness in her dancing blood that made her utterly indifferent as to what reception she would get from her mother. The light from the street-lamps fell on her face as she put her hand in his with a gesture of dismissal, not learned, assuredly, at Mrs. Barlow’s school. But at the clasp of his strong fingers she thrilled, and knew the world would end for her before she forgot him. She drew a long, shivering breath as she watched him drive away. “I wish,” she thought, with a sudden vain longing, “that I had let him tell me his name! But I will find him again some day, as sure as he and I live in this world.” She little knew how she would find him--nor what terror would make her almost forget him first--as she calmly rang at her mother’s door-bell. CHAPTER II. “A PENNILESS ADVENTURESS.” Lord Abbotsford stood in front of the fire and broke what had been a long silence. He was tall and rather good-looking; years younger than the woman who sat opposite him, her haggard face hidden in her hands. But his voice was rough to brutality as he spoke. “You knew I should have to marry some day. I can’t see why you are making such a fuss.” Mrs. Trelane quivered with anger. She had known it, but of late it had been herself whom she had thought of as Lady Abbotsford. After all, why not? She was as well born as he, and there was nothing--that Abbotsford knew--against her. She took her hands from her eyes and looked at him. “Be civil, it can’t hurt you,” she said coldly. “Well, you did know it, Helen!” But his eyes fell shiftingly, though he could not know the reason for the despair in hers. Helen Trelane was like a gambler who had put his all on one throw and seen it swept off the board. Her last few hundred pounds of capital had gone in the struggle to be always well dressed and to have a good dinner always for Lord Abbotsford. She had played not for his love, but for his coronet. And to-night his news had cut the very ground from under her feet. It was for this that she had forsaken the cheerful companions who amused her; to have this dissipated boy stand up and tell her roundly that he was going to be married, and would in future dispense with the pleasure of her acquaintance. And this to her, who had been born à la Marchant!