like the work you will have to do? You will help to found a new civilisation. Your name will be famous all over the world. Perhaps you will be the first woman who ever vindicated for woman her true place in the great work of the world."

"I don't believe I am worthy of any such high destiny," Geraldine said, forcing a smile. "You must find some one else, Mr. Montana ; some woman who would be equal to such a place, and who would like it. I am not equal to it, and I shouldn't like it."

"You don't yet know your own capabilities: who ever does until the moment comes?"

"The moment has come now for me to go away," she said, "and to get home. I ought not to have come. You have made me more sorry than ever that I did come; but I would venture a good deal for a friend. I ought to thank you, Mr. Montana, I know, and to feel grateful to you. I am sure many women would think this the very height of their ambition. But it is not for me, and I thank you as much as I can. I will thank you with all my heart and soul if you will only say that we shall not speak of this any more." "We need not speak of it very often," he answered. "I shall only remind you of it when the time seems to me fitting. I am satisfied; I know that every day's thought you give to this is sure to work for me, and I know that the more you try to avoid thinking of it, the more it will be in your mind. Now I don't mean to keep you any longer. Shall I see you safely to your door?"

“Oh, no ; please don't. Let me go alone. I shall be quite safe." She was already hurrying away, her whole horizon now being bounded by the mere hope of escape for that once.

He bade her "Good-night" quietly.

She hurried home in terror and a kind of shame. She gave Melissa her ransomed letter, and listened patiently to Melissa's interjections, partly of gratitude, partly of petulance, and made hardly any reply. She was inclined to say more than once, "You don't know what it may have cost me to get you back that foolish letter which you wrote in your absurd transport." But she repressed herself, and said nothing of the kind. She felt like one who is in possession of some guilty secret, like one who has entered into an alliance with unholy and supernatural agents, and for whom henceforward the real world loses its firm reality, by whom anything may be expected, however strange. She was bitterly angry with herself for not having more vehemently and finally rejected Montana's appeals, and broken off with him once and for all. But she had committed herself, she felt, in asking him to return Melissa's letter. She had put herself

into a secret alliance with him, and from that moment had to treat him with consideration and the semblance of gratitude. What distressed her especially was the secret, inexplicable fear that perhaps she might not be able to hold herself aloof from him in the end. Perhaps he might get such a control over her, and so isolate her from other sympathies and other confidence, that she might actually have to yield and marry him in the end. She did not allow this terror to get hold of her without reasoning stoutly against it, and telling herself again and again that the time of witchcraft is passed, as well as the time of dragging young girls to the altar willy-nilly. She tried to laugh at her own fears; told herself that as long as she was determined not to marry Montana, Montana could not possibly marry her. But all the same, she saw how fate and her own fault, or her own quixotic generosity, or whatever it was, had brought her into a relationship with Montana which she could not at one time have believed possible; how he had made use of it to bring her and him into at least a momentary isolation from the rest of the world; and how she had more than once that night felt her spirit quail under the influence of that strange look which he fixed upon her. She had no friend to whom she could speak her mind, and the night was distressful to her, and she woke in the morning with a strange sensation, as if her old world had slipped away from her altogether and left her drifting in chaos.

CHAPTER XX.

A BREAKING-UP.

FOR Some days Captain Marion and his household had heard nothing of Clement Hope. Geraldine thought that there was something ominous in his absence and silence. It occurred to her that something must be the matter with Mr. Varlowe. She said as much to Captain Marion. Captain Marion was on the point of leaving town with Mr. Aquitaine for the northern city in which Aquitaine lived. They were going in obedience to a telegram from young Fanshawe. Fanshawe, when he heard of the incident in the Church of Free Souls, had naturally been aroused to keen interest and anxiety about it. If Mr. Varlowe's belief were not a delusion, then this Montana, this mysterious preacher and prophet and leader, must be the husband of his dead sister; and, if so, what a profound impostor he must be ! Fanshawe was determined, if possible, to find out the truth of the matter, and he hurried off at once to the town of

his birth,-where pretty Miss Fanshawe had lived, and fallen in love, and married, and died. From that town he now sent to Captain Marion a telegram begging him to leave London and join him there at once, and Marion and Aquitaine were going this evening by the five-o'clock train. The women were to be left alone, except for the companionship of Mr. Trescoe, who was a moody companion enough these last few days. Something had come over him. He was not like himself. He was silent, and sometimes almost stern, and now and then made Katherine short answers, which were new to her, and to which she did not reply with any of her usual spirit. There was something strange and cowed and fearful about Katherine's manner of late. She was wont to rule over her husband with the most undisguised sway. live under a petticoat government open and avowed. His wife did not make the least affectation, as some judicious women do, of being the ruled while actually the ruler. She apparently took rather a pleasure in letting everybody see how completely her husband was her subject, and he seemed to enjoy his subjection. But things had changed these last few days. She was fearful; he was sullen.

He used to

"I wish we had not to go on this business," Marion said. He and Aquitaine and Trescoe were together. "I don't like it. It seems like a sort of detective job. It looks as if we suspected Montana of something."

"And don't we?" Trescoe asked.

"I don't; and I'm sure, Frank, you don't either, if you would only let your true nature have its way. I wouldn't stir a step in this business of Fanshawe's, only that I want to have the satisfaction of seeing his suspicions proved to be ridiculous, and of telling him so. Of course it is excusable enough in him to be astonished and alarmed and all that; but with us it is different."

"But look here, you know," said Aquitaine, "it is a terribly serious business for us all, as well as for Fanshawe. It might not be any matter in itself whether this fellow was Edmund Varlowe or was not; but it is a tremendously serious thing if a man who has such influence, and is carrying on the great enterprise he talks of, and entangling the fortunes and whole future of thousands of men and women, should turn out to be an impostor in anything."

"I don't know what you are all about," Marion said uneasily; you are all down upon Montana. I never saw such a thing. I fully believe the man is as true as steel and as open as the sun. It is his very nobleness of character that gets him such enemies."

"Come, now," Aquitaine interposed good-humouredly, but with

a certain firmness of tone, "you ought not to say that to us, Marion. You ought not to say that we don't like the man because of his nobleness of character."

"Oh, no, no," Marion said emphatically, "I don't mean that, Aquitaine. I mean that his nobleness of character makes him enemies, and they send out stories about him, and fill the air with calumnies, and some of these things always stick, you know, and they impress even sensible men like yourself. I wish you could look at Montana as I do. I wish you knew him as I do, and then you would"

"But what do you know about him?" Trescoe asked in a tone very unlike that which he usually adopted towards his father-in-law. "You know nothing about him; you hear fine talk, and you see that the women all round are taken with him."

"I don't see anything of the kind," Marion interposed; "some of them are as unjust to him as you are."

"I don't want to be unjust to anyone," said Trescoe, "but I have had enough of him, and I won't stand it much longer."

face.

"Won't stand what?" Marion asked, looking him fixedly in the

"Well, I don't know about that," said Trescoe ; " or rather, I do know-I know what I mean, and I won't stand it much longer." He turned away and left them.

"Now, Marion," said Aquitaine, "don't you really see the change that is made even in that young fellow by your friendship with Montana ?"

Captain Marion grew a little redder and hotter than was usual with him.

"I see that Trescoe's in a bad humour about him, and I don't say that he's quite wrong. As you seem to know something about this, Aquitaine, and as you come to the point, I must say I do wish my daughter Katherine did not express her admiration of Montana quite so openly. I don't wonder if Trescoe is annoyed, and I think he ought to have stopped it long ago; but then one must not blame the girl. He is very handsome, very fascinating, and kind to women in a grave, fatherly sort of way, and honourable and all that; and you know, Aquitaine, she is not the only one."

"No," said Aquitaine with a sigh, "she is not. There are others as foolish as she; and I wish to God my little girl had never seen him I wish to God you had never seen him. His coming has only brought discomfort to us all, and it is well if it does not bring some unhappiness before we have done with it."

Marion himself was not without some of the same uneasy feeling; but he was loyal to his friend, who, he honestly believed, was misjudged and misprized; and he would not give him up. He thought, however, it would be well to make some change in the arrangements he had laid out for the holiday-the holiday which was to have brought so much pleasure, and which already seemed withering away into mere discomfort. He thought, perhaps, it would be well that Trescoe and his wife should go to the Continent at once, and leave the rest of them to follow that would be something. Aquitaine, of course, could easily take his daughter home whenever he would, and that would remove another embarrassment. There would only remain Sydney Marion and Geraldine, neither of whom appeared particularly sensitive to Montana's attractions. Thus, Marion thought, things would all go right again, and he would really get from Montana a clear, precise, business-like explanation-he laid great emphasis mentally on the word "business-like "-of his project in all its details. Captain Marion actually felt business-like as he mentally repeated the word. It seemed to him to solve much of the difficulty. Yes, it must come to that, of course, in the end, even between the closest friends. Business-like it must be; business-like-he was resolved on that.

His daughter Katherine came upon him that moment. Aquitaine had left the room.

"Things seem pretty bad, papa," she observed. "I never saw Frank in such moods as he is getting into lately. He talks of taking me away to the Continent at once."

"Well, well," said Marion, “I think he is quite right. I wonder he did not do it before. You know I spoke to you, my dear, about this. I told you your goings-on about Montana would never do ; people would be sure to misunderstand them."

"I am

sure I don't know what I have done," Katherine expostulated. "You all rave about him, or at least you did as long as you liked; and because I can't help thinking him a handsome man and a very agreeable man, everybody is down upon me. Frank is changed altogether; he goes on as if I had done something improper."

"No, no, Katherine, don't talk in that flippant way; it is painful. Nobody supposes you have ever done or thought anything improper. But it does not look well when you women get vying with each other in admiration about any man; and I can't blame Frank for not liking that kind of thing-no husband would like it. Be a good