Accordingly Lucy ushered the stranger into the Green Parlor and shut the door upon the two. Then she retired a little way down the corridor and listened. The stranger's voice reached her as a low, deep murmur, but the walls were too thick and she was too far away to distinguish anything that was said. Then presently she heard Miss Pengarvon's voice as if in reply, rising gradually to a pitch of shrillness and vituperative energy such as she would not have believed possible in the mistress of Broome. Involuntarily Lucy crept further away, and it was as well she did so, seeing that before the stranger had been more than five minutes in the room, the door was flung suddenly open. "Leave my house this instant, and never dare to set foot in it again," exclaimed Miss Pengarvon in her harshest tones. "Then you positively refuse to give me the information I ask for?" said the stranger, as if urging some point for the last time. "Let me beg of you to reconsider your determination." "I have no information to give you, as I have already told you. Go; that is all I demand of you! Go!" Then, if Lucy had been there, she would have seen Miss Pengarvon with trembling fingers tear up the stranger's card and fling the fragments contemptuously at his feet. "You may pretend not to believe what I have told you, but you are assured in your heart that it is true," he said, still speaking in the cold, level tones he had adopted throughout the interview. "Lies--lies--lies! I feel no assurance of the kind. I place no credence in anything you have told me. Go, and never darken the threshold of this house again!" Without a word more the stranger passed out of the Green Parlor, and the instant he had done so the door was shut and locked behind him. "A fiend--nothing less than a fiend!" he remarked half aloud, as Lucy, with a scared face, proceeded to let him out at the front door. Barney Dale, who had been away on some errand for his mistress at the time of the stranger's visit, was duly informed by his niece of all that had happened during his absence, as far as the facts were known to her. After Miss Pengarvon had retired for the night, Barney, perceiving the pieces of torn card on the floor, picked them carefully up, and succeeded, after a little trouble, in arranging them in their proper order, That being done he read, "Major Strickland, Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall." "I canna call the name to mind nohow," muttered the old fellow. "What business can it ha' been that brought him all the way from London to Broome? Not----? No--that was all passed and over years ago. No, anything but that." CHAPTER XXII. EPHRAIM JUDD'S STRANGE EXPERIENCE.