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 at Baden, uncertain what to do or where to go, feeling as if he had received a sudden check—a sort of spiritual snub—which arrested the accumulation of motive. Lovelock, also, whom Bernard saw every day, appeared to think that destiny had given him a slap in the face, for he had not enjoyed the satisfaction of a last interview with Miss Evers.

"I thought she might have written me a note," said the Captain; "but it appears she doesn't write. Some girls don't write, you know."

Bernard remarked that it was possible Lovelock should still have news of Miss Blanche; and before he left Baden he learned that she had addressed her forsaken swain a charming little note from Lausanne, where the three ladies had paused in their flight from Baden, and where Mrs. Vivian had decreed that for the present they should remain.

"I'm devilish glad she writes," said Captain Lovelock; "some girls do write, you know."

Blanche found Lausanne most horrid after Baden, for whose delights she hourly pined. The delights of Baden, however, were not obvious just now to her correspondent, who had taken Bernard's fifty pounds into the Kursaal and left them there. Bernard, on learning his misfortune, lent him another fifty, with which he performed a second series of unsuccessful experiments; and our hero was not at his ease until he had passed over to his luckless friend the whole amount of his own winnings, every penny of which found its way through Captain Lovelock's fingers back into the bank. When this operation was completed, Bernard left Baden, the Captain gloomily accompanying him to the station.

I have said that there had come over Bernard a singular sense of freedom. One of the uses he made of his freedom was to undertake a long journey. He went to the East, and remained absent from Europe 120