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 pulsed her advances by stolidly ignoring them.

“Gad! but I’d cut my hand off rather than harm should come to that girl, let alone never being able to look Alec in the face again,” he muttered, as he gnawed his white mustache in perplexity.

The situation was indeed serious from the point of view that Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was head of a gang of international criminals, and that she was, moreover, as he put it in his simple soldier phrase, “sweet upon” his nephew Alec. If, for her as yet unexplained ends, she would not stick at assassinating the Duke of Beaumanoir, she would be capable of wreaking a deadly vengeance on the girl who had won the heart she hungered for. Once installed as a guest in the mansion, she would have plenty of facilities of which she might make venomous use. The General had engineered her invitation with the laudable purpose of keeping her under constant observation and of making communication with her confederates difficult; but in his zeal for check-mating her predatory designs he had forgotten her amatory ones.

It was true that Sybil’s engagement had not yet been published to the world, but the