"If you please, m'm," answered Metcalfe, who had opened the door while Miss Clara was speaking, and was standing in an apologetic way with one hand on the handle. "I knocked twice, but you were talking and didn't hear me," he went on. "Miss Kate sent me. She'd like a word with you at once, please, and before Mr. Rissler goes." "All right--I'll come." Then, Metcalfe having made his bow and gone, she turned to me: "You'll find the _Times_ there on the table. I shan't be away long." But she was away long--so long, indeed, that she did not return at all. For almost an hour I was left alone, and then the door opened a few inches, and instead of Miss Clara, Kate slipped quickly in. Closing it, but with one hand still holding the handle, she faced me. She looked deadly pale, and trembled violently. "Mr. Rissler," she said, "my aunt tells me that you have promised her what you refused to promise me--that you will in future abandon the dangerous and not altogether creditable line of work you have taken up in constituting yourself a detective. Is that so?" "That is so," I answered hotly; "but in regard to its being a discreditable occupation, and in regard to my having promised Miss Carleton what I would not promise to you, I must protest----" "Forgive me," she said coldly, "but I cannot argue the matter, or listen to any explanation or protestation. I have come here to ask you--to bid you--for my aunt, as well as for myself, to leave this house instantly, and never, under any circumstances, to enter it again." CHAPTER XXIII. KATE'S CONFESSION. "I will give no such promise," I began furiously. "I will----" Then I stopped short. "Forgive me. I have some decent instincts left, I hope--in spite of my being a detective," I added bitterly. "You are, of course, within your rights; and if you so command, I have no option but to obey. But even you cannot command me or compel me to cease from loving you. Am I to have no explanation?" "You are to have no explanation," she repeated in a dull, dreamy voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and with her eyes fixed on a far-off space of sky which she could see through the window. "Except, perhaps--you have already said it--it is because you hate me," I prompted bitterly. Moveless as a listening sleep-walker, she made answer: "It is _not_ because I hate you." "Do you, or do you not, hate me?" I pleaded. And again, dully, indifferently, like one speaking in her sleep, she replied: "I do _not_ hate you." "But you dislike me," I urged. With the same troubled, far-off look in her beautiful eyes, she repeated, automatically: "I do _not_ dislike you." For a moment, like the defiant fluttering of a banner over a besieged and well-nigh surrendered city, Hope sprang up to raise her red flag upon the ramparts of my heart; but at the sight of the dull indifference in the girl's eyes, banner and banner-bearer sank back.