Busy with such thoughts, she hastened along the road, until she awoke with a start to the knowledge that she was opposite Gateway House. Certainly the retreat was admirable from the point of view of a man surfeited with life on the Great White Way. Indeed, it looked very like a private lunatic asylum or home for inebriates, with its lofty walls studded with broken glass, and its solid gate crowned with iron spikes. Winifred tried the door. It opened readily. She was surprised that so pretentious an abode had no lodge-keeper's cottage. There were signs of few vehicles passing over the weed-grown gravel drive, and such marks as existed were quite recent. She was so late, however, that her confused mind did not trouble about these things, and she sped on gracefully, soon coming in full view of the house itself. It was now almost dark, and the grounds seemed very lonely; but the presence of lights in the secluded mansion gave earnest of some one awaiting her there. She fancied she heard a noise, like the snapping of a latch or lock behind her. She turned her head, but saw no one. Fowle, hiding among the evergreens, had run with nimble feet and sardonic smile to bolt the gate as soon as she was out of sight. And now Winifred was at the front door, timidly pulling a bell. A man strolled with a marked limp around the house from a conservatory. He was a tall, strongly built person, and something in the dimly seen outline sent a thrill of apprehension through her. But the door opened. "I have come--" she began. The words died away in sheer affright. Glowering at her, with a queer look of gratified menace, was Rachel Craik! "So I see," was the grim retort. "Come in, Winnie, by all means. Where have you been all these weeks?" "There is some mistake," she faltered, white with sudden terror and nameless suspicions. "My agent told me to come here--" "Quite right. Be quick, or you'll miss the last train home," growled the voice of Voles behind her. Roughly, though not violently, he pushed her inside, and the door closed. He snapped at Rachel: "She'd be yelling for help in another second, and you never know who may be passing." Now, Winifred was not of the order of women who faint in the presence of danger. Her love had given her a great strength; her suffering had deepened her fine nature; and her very soul rebelled against the cruel subterfuge which had been practised to separate her from her lover. She saw, with the magic intuition of her sex, that the very essence of a deep-laid plot was that Rex and she should be kept apart. The visit of Mrs. Carshaw, then, was only a part of the same determined scheme? Rex's mother had been a puppet in the hands of those who carried her to Connecticut, who strove so determinedly to take her away when Carshaw put in an appearance, and who had tricked her into keeping this bogus appointment. She would defy them, face death itself rather than yield.