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 to leave me for the night. I can look after myself, for once!"

The maid protested, wept, but was expelled, and a key turned between them; then Hilda Bouverie read her note again:—

"'Escaped this afternoon. Came to your concert. Hiding in boudoir. Give me five minutes, or raise alarm, which you please.—.'"

So ran his words in pencil on her own paper, and they were true; she had heard at supper of the escape. Once more she looked in the glass. And to her own eyes in these minutes she looked years younger—there was a new sensation left in life!

A touch to her hair, a glance in the pier-glass, and all for a notorious convict broken prison! So into the boudoir with her grandest air; but again she locked the door behind her, and, sweeping round, beheld a bald man bowing to her in immaculate evening clothes.

"Are you the writer of a note found on my dressing-table?" she demanded, every syllable off the ice.

"I am."

"Then who are you, besides being an impudent forger?"