bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her father's very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life. He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat, loathsome face and gripping hands.

The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if that door opened. She was to walk-yes-but under the gas-lamps, and not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with the pain of her humiliation.

Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement, each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with blows.

Could she make her living? "I shouldn't know what to buy or how to use it," she cried miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill herself. At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an imposter in it always. It was a

place of falsities. There was but one true, real thing in it all-the turnstile in the wall which gave admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile, with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new epitome of life.

Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth was made known to her. These things had happened.

Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the alteration in her looks, and set herself to counterfeit an air of gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, the knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out with an affected blitheness:

"I hope, my dear, that you haven't made many absolutely unalterable arrangements for the summer. And Cynthia turned as white as the table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes. They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.

"No," she answered faintly. "No arrangements that cannot be altered. I was going to stay for a week with-" and as she compared the summer which she had

planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest the choking of her voice should betray her.

"That's well," continued Robert, "for you have a journey to make, Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would not perhaps want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there's some sort of lawyer's trouble over the title."

"We have known there was some trouble," Joan hastened to explain, "for quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it very serious." "Now we know that it is," continued Robert, "and I am afraid that we must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to look after the estancia." And since Cynthia made no reply, but still looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: "I hope, my dear, you won't be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to be confident that you would enjoy the trip."

"And, of course, I shall," cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings. Even now the room whirled about her. "I shall be delighted to go with you. When shall we start?"

"Yes, that's the point," said Mr. Daventry uncomfortably. "The telegram is very urgent, and there's a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There's certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?"

"Of course," said Cynthia.

The color came again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life.

The world was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror, she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two friends her gratitude and her knowledge.

They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning, drove straight along the Docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of her cabin, to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a chair.

"You won't mind, dear, will you?" she said. "We shall probably be kept some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country, and that we could get you some fine horses and-" and suddenly she felt Cynthia's arms about her neck, and the girl's tears upon her cheeks.

"My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!" cried Cynthia. "I don't mind about the horses, if only you'll keep me with you.”

"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Daventry. "What should we do without you ourselves?"

The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.

"Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck," said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia's outburst down, not to any guess at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl's moment of emotion.

The steamer put into Monte Video, and Santos, and Rio, and glided northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was dressed from stem to stern with flags.

Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside her on the rail; and for answer he pointed northward to a small black ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his binocular.

"That's the Perhaps, bound for the South," he said; and he saw the girl's face flush red.

She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the boat. The Perhaps was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam, broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set upon her yards. "But she's so small," cried Cynthia. "She has to be small," replied the first officer. "Length's no use for her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack. She won't."

"But she's out for three years," said Cynthia.

"There'll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told."

Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck; she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good wishes; and then the name in new, gold letters came out upon the black stern beneath the counter. "Thank you," she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the unknown South.

"I am very glad to have seen the Perhaps," she said slowly.

The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of emotion in her voice. "Perhaps you have friends on board," he said. "If you have, I envy them."

"No," she said slowly. "I know no one on board. But I am glad to have seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which is now over."

The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty girl of seven

teen or so, talking about a part of her life which was over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.

Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought something of a revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.

They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan, with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a great fear lest she should see the door open.

T

HE Thames that most of us know is a toy river in a fair country of lawns and meadows wonderfully green, of gray manor-houses and parks of ancient oaks, where the levels between the locks are crowded with skiffs, punts, and small pleasure steamers, and every nook and bight of shaded shore has its picnic party. This is astonishingly unlike the Thames that sailors know. Where it meets the brown tide which swirls up from the sea they call it London River and as such it was famed in their chanties when the Yankee packets were storming across the Atlantic and the tall East Indiamen swung abreast of Gravesend or dropped down past the Nore. No bright plaything for summer holidays is London River but a crowded road of empire, the turbid thoroughfare of a seaport great and ancient. Much of this commerce is hidden from the casual eye because the shipping is scattered along twenty-five miles of the stream. In the heart of the city itself the waterfront contains so many stretches of archaic

picturesque dilapidation and such compelling associations with a storied past that Elizabethan England is rather suggested than the age of steel and steam and the wireless telegraph. There is no line of modern quays and wharves, no spacious harbor. The river is a great deal too small for its traffic and large ships must seek the inland docks dug out of the flat landscape far below London.

The coastwise craft and steamers trading with the ports of Europe huddle in the Upper and the Lower Pool from London Bridge to the reach on the seaward side of Tower Bridge, or moor beside dingy warehouses that lip the tide, or are tucked away in secluded, obsolete basins behind walls and tenements where you would never dream of looking to find anything afloat. It is this antiquated part of maritime London which can be seen in glimpses from the bridges or the Embankment, the close packed steamers painted in many colors, the drifting barges, the agile tugs, and over all a haze, blended of smoke and mist, which softens and mellows without concealing.