"He? By what right does he dare? He is interested in Violet! That is whom the man is interested in, Mrs. Mordaunt, I tell you! And do you know what this man is? I have been at the pains to discover--a scribbler of books, a man of notoriously bad character who has had to fly from America--" "How awful! But Mr. Dibbin, the agent, had references--" "References are quite useless. It is as I say, and I am not guessing when I assert to you that Violet has a penchant for this man--a most dangerous penchant, which can lead to nothing but disaster, if it be not now scotched in the bud. I demand it as my right, and I beseech it as a friend, that she never see him again." "Yet it is all most strange. I think you exaggerate. Violet's fancies are not errant." "Well, say that I exaggerate. But you will at least sympathize, Mrs. Mordaunt, with my sense of the acute danger of your further stay in London at present--" "I think you make a mountain of a molehill, Mr. Van Hupfeldt," said Mrs. Mordaunt with some dryness, "and I am sorry now that I have promised not to speak with Violet on the subject. Of course, I recognize your right to have your say and your way, but as for leaving London to-day at a moment's notice, really that can't be done." "Not to oblige me? not to please me?" said he, grasping the old lady's hand with a nervous intensity of gesture that almost startled her. "We might go to-morrow," she admitted. "But if they correspond or meet to-night?" "Well, you are a lover, of course; but you shouldn't start at shadows. Here is Violet herself." "Leave us a little, will you?" whispered Van Hupfeldt, rising to meet the girl in his impulsive foreigner's way, but, forgetting his wounded leg, he had to stop short with a face of pain. "Are you ill?" asked Violet, and a certain aloofness of manner did not escape him. "A small accident--" he told over again the history of his fall from a horse which had never borne him. Mrs. Mordaunt went out. Violet stood at a table, turning over the leaves of a book, while Van Hupfeldt searched her face under his anxious eyes, and there was a silence between them, until Violet, taking from her pocket David's first unsigned note to her, held it out, saying: "It was you who sent me this?" "I have told you so," answered Van Hupfeldt, gray to the lips. "Why do you ask again?" "Because I am puzzled," she answered. "I have this morning received a note in this same handwriting, unless I am very much mistaken, a note from a certain Mr.--" "Yes. Harcourt--Christian name David." "Quite so. David Harcourt--I can say it," she answered quietly. "But how, then, comes it that your note and his are in the same handwriting?" Van Hupfeldt's lips opened and shut, his eyes shifted, and yet he chuckled with the uneasy mirth of a ghoul: "The solution of that puzzle doesn't seem difficult to me." "You mean that you got Mr. Harcourt to write your note for you?" asked Violet. "You are shrewdness itself," answered Van Hupfeldt.