There is a boundary even to human patience; and now, after many days, Max Bray began to find his position very irksome. There was every probability of Ella’s being a long and tedious illness, succeeded by a very slow return to convalescence; and he sat, at length, one day thinking matters over, for he was thoroughly tired out. There were no amusements in the place, and not wishing to attract curiosity, he had kept himself closely within doors. It was tiresome to a degree, and, besides, his stock of money would not last for ever. Come what might, he felt that he could put up with his position no longer. To a great extent his stratagem had been successful; but this unforeseen illness had made it now a failure, and he might as well give up and go to London. It had been expensive certainly; but though he was a loser, some one else would gain enormously; and he grinned again and again as he softly rubbed his white hands together, and thought of what a banker that some one would in the future prove. She would never be able to refuse him money, however extravagant he might be, and fortunately the Vinings were enormously wealthy. “But, bai Jove!” said Max Bray half aloud, “what a sweet thing is love between brother and sister!”

Then Mr Maximilian Bray began to make his plans for the future. He told himself that time enough had elapsed; that he need not certainly give up Ella, but arrange with the landlord that he should be informed directly she was getting better, and then he could come down again—that could be easily managed—and he really was tired out of this. He also made a few other plans; building, too, a few more castles in the air, ending with the determination of going up to town by the first train in the morning, and getting to know how Laura’s affair was progressing.

“At all events, her way’s clear,” said Max, “and, bai Jove, she shall pay me for it by and by.”

“L’homme propose, mais Dieu dispose.” Max Bray arranged all future matters to his entire satisfaction, but again there were contingencies that he could not foresee. Sitting there, rolling his cigar in his mouth and reckoning how long it would be to lunch, he had made up his mind to dine the next day at his club; but he did not; neither did other matters turn out quite so satisfactorily as he wished.

The sojourn was at a quiet little hotel in a Gloucestershire town that it is unnecessary to name; suffice it if we say that, save on the weekly market-day, the streets, with two exceptions, were silent and deserted; the two exceptions being the time when the children were set free from the National Schools. Hence, then, any little noise or excitement was unusual, and it was no wonder that Max Bray was startled by a scream above stairs, a cry for help, and the trampling of feet; sounds which his coward heart soon interpreted for him to mean an awful termination to his “stratagem,” when, rising hurriedly to his feet, he stood there resting one hand upon the table, and the cold perspiration standing in great drops upon his pallid face.

There were people coming towards his room—they were coming to tell him. “What of it, then?” he cried savagely. “Could he help it? Had no doctor been obtained? It was her own mad excitement led to this termination.”

“O, sir! O, sir!” exclaimed the landlady, bursting tearful-eyed into the room, “your poor, dear, sweet lady!”

“Dead?” asked Max in a harsh whisper, his knees shaking beneath him as he spoke.

“No, sir, not dead. I only left her for a few minutes, and when I came back—”

“Well, what? Speak, woman!” cried Max fiercely.

“She was gone, sir.”

Max Bray stood for a minute as if stunned, and then leaping at the woman he shook her savagely, before he started off to make inquiries.

“Had anyone seen her?”

“No, not a soul.” But her clothes that she had worn the day she was borne insensible to the hotel were gone, as was also her little leather reticule-bag.

“Where could she have gone?”

Only one place could strike Max Bray, as he thought of what she would do if sense had returned, and she had mastered her weakness sufficiently to enable her to steal from the house unobserved. There was only one place that she could seek with the intention of fleeing from him, and that was the railway station.

“Was their life to be bound up somehow with railways?” he asked himself as he started off in the directio............