Judge Favart de Caumartin's residence was a large, rambling structure, more like a hotel than like a private house. Considering that his wife was dead and that he had but one living child, a daughter of seventeen, it was strange that he kept up such an extensive establishment, in which, perhaps, twenty rooms stood richly furnished but unoccupied. It was his pleasure, however, and his pleasure was law.

Mlle. Olympe de Caumartin was greatly surprised when by merest chance she discovered Hepworth Coleman making himself quite at home in a remote room of the house. We have seen how she showed her confusion as she stepped into the doorway and found herself face to face with the young man. The glance that passed between them wrought a wonder in the heart of each. I shall not say that they fell in love at first sight. Love cannot be so accurately traced that its origin can be exactly found out in any particular case. It is enough to record that Mlle. Olympe de Caumartin caught something new, something sweet from that momentary gaze, and shut it up in her heart involuntarily, with a thrill that never again quite left her breast. She was back through halls and rooms to her own boudoir, her cheeks and lips rosy with excitement, and a gentle tremor in her limbs.

That evening in the library the Judge told his daughter that he had given a suit of rooms in the farthest wing of the mansion to a wealthy young gentleman from New York.

"I have had letters from Mr. Cartwright, my banker there, asking me to take care of him, and this seemed the best I could do under the circumstances. I did not see my way to bringing him any nearer to us. We don't care to have another member added to our family, eh, Olympe, dear?"

Mlle. de Caumartin blushed. She may have felt a touch of guilt because she could not muster courage to tell her father that she had already visited Mr. Coleman.

"I have not seen him yet," continued the Judge; "I thought it best to let him have some rest before calling upon him. Cartwright advises me that he is of an excellent family—a man to be given the greatest attention, and for my banker's sake, if for nothing else, I must meet the demand upon my hospitality. He came a fortnight earlier than I expected; but I had Jules watching for him, and you know Jules never fails."

"But you should have told me before, father dear," said Mlle. Olympe. "Only a while ago, while wandering through the distant wing of the house, I invaded this young gentleman's apartment. It surprised him evidently as much as it abashed me."

"The obvious moral of which is," replied the Judge quickly, "that you are hereafter to be more careful about what rooms you are stumbling into." As he spoke his dark oval face, with its fine, grave smile, was almost like a boy's. The flush that lay under the skin shone through with a suggestion of some repressed stimulus, as if a great passion had forced it up. In his eyes an underglow, so to call it, smoldered with fascinating vagueness.

Mlle. Olympe sat for a moment on his knee and stroked his long black hair.

"You will stay with me to-night, father, dear," she presently murmured, coaxingly; "you will not go out to-night."

"I must be gone a little while," he said, rising at once, "but just a little while."

She clung close to him.

"Not this night, please," she urged, with a touching tremor in her voice. "Oh! you remember this night a year ago you had that dreadful adventure in the dark room. You must not go out; please, for my sake, do not."

An expert observer could have seen while this was going on a strange, half-worried, almost fiercely concentrated expression in the Judge's eyes. It was as if he mightily wished to remain with his child, but could not by any effort resist some powerful temptation tugging at him and drawing him away.

He kissed her tenderly, pushed her gently from him and went out.

The girl cast herself upon a sofa and buried her face in her hands, as a vision of that night one year before came up before her eyes.

Some strange masked men had brought her father home far in the night, white as a ghost, helpless, speechless, apparently dead. They put him down there in the room and vanished.

He had no wound, no bruise, no mark of any violence. But he recovered very slowly, and he never told what had befallen him.

Mlle. Olympe knew of her father's frequent duels, and if he had been brought in dead or badly off on account of pistol ball or rapier thrust she would not have been surprised beyond measure, but this mysterious performance of the masked men and the unaccountable condition of the Judge were taken hold upon by her imagination and raised to the highest power of romantic meaning.

A year had passed, and she might not have recalled the exact anniversary but for the prattle of an old servant to the effect that she had seen her master, the Judge, marching at the head of a company of masked men, himself wearing an "invisible" mask and a queer black velvet cap.

Mlle. Olympe observed that her father was flushed as if with wine, and his bearing was indicative of some subtile and indescribable excitement within him. When he went away she felt that something startling was going to happen soon.