I think I will wait upon her myself, and explain the painful
necessity."
"Yes, and be duped by her plausible tongue," cried Reginald bitterly."
She completely bewitched my poor uncle. Do you know that he picked her
up out of the gutter, and knew no more of her past life than he knew of
the inhabitants of the other planets? If you see her, she will fool you
as she fooled him."
"I am not afraid of her witcheries," answered the magistrate, with
dignity. "I shall do my duty, Sir Reginald, you may depend upon it."
Reginald Eversleigh said no more. He left the library without uttering
a word to any of the gentlemen. The despair which had seized upon him
was too terrible for words. Alone, locked in his own room, he gnashed
his teeth in agony.
"Fools! dolts! idiots that we have been, with all our deeply-laid plots
and subtle scheming," he cried, as he paced up and down the room in a
paroxysm of mad rage, "She triumphs in spite of us--she can laugh us to
scorn! And Victor Carrington, the man whose intellect was to conquer
impossibilities, what a shallow fool he has shown himself, after all! I
thought there was something superhuman in his success, so strangely did
fate seem to favour his scheming; and now, at the last--when the cup
was at my lips--it is snatched away, and dashed to the ground!"
* * * * *
CHAPTER XII.
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