by himself. He climbed almost to the summit of a neighboring mound, and stopped suddenly, with his face uplifted, as if smelling something. Like many short-sighted persons, he had a keen scent. In a few minutes he came back again.

I have found them," he whispered to Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy. Smelt 'em-like sealing-wax. Eleven of themwaiting there for Cornish," and he smiled with a sort of boyish glee.

moistened the tips of his fingers at his lips.

The Malgamiters moved forward, and White followed them. They took up a position in a hollow a few yards away from the foot-path by which Cornish must pass. One of their number remained behind, crouching on a mound, and evi: dently reporting progress to his companions below. When Cornish was within a hundred yards of the ambush, White suddenly ran up the bank, and lifting

Thump them," he answered, and presently went back to his post of observation. Uncle Ben had fallen asleep, and the two women stood side by side waiting in the moonlight. It was chilly, and a keen wind swept in from the sea. Dorothy shivered. They could still hear certain notes of certain instruments in the band of the Scheveningen Kurhaus, nearly two miles away. It was strange to be within sound of such evidences of civilization, and yet in such a lonely spot-strange to reflect that eleven men were waiting within a few yards of them to murder one. And yet they could safely have carried out their intention, and have scraped a hole in the sand to hide his body, in the certainty that it would never be found; for these dunes are a miniature Desert of Sahara, where nothing bids men leave the beaten paths, where certain hollows have probably never been trodden by the foot of man, and where the ever-drifting sand slowly accumulates-a very abomination of desolation.

At length White rose to his feet agilely enough, and crept to the brow of the dune. The men were evidently moving. Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy ascended the bank to the spot just vacated by White.

Only a few dozen yards away they could see the black forms of the Malgamiters grouped together under the covert of a low hillock. Hidden from their sight, Major White was slowly stalking them.

Dorothy touched Mrs. Vansittart's arm, and pointed silently in the direction of Scheveningen. A man was approaching, alone, across the silvery sand hills. It was Tony Cornish, walking into the trap laid for him. Major White saw him also, and thinking himself unobserved, or from mere habit acquired among his men, he

VOL. XCVII-No. 577.-11

his comrades. He followed this vigorous attack by charging down into the confused mass. In a few moments the Malgamiters streamed away across the sand hills like a pack of hounds, though pursued and not pursuing. They left some of their number on the sand behind them, for White was a hard hitter.

"Give it to them, Tony!" White cried, with a certain ring of exultation in his voice. "Knock 'em down as they come!"

For there was only one path, and the Malgamiters had to run the gauntlet of Tony Cornish, who knocked some of them over neatly enough as they passed, selecting the big ones, and letting the others go free. He knew them by the smell of their clothes, and guessed their intention readily enough.

It was a strange scene, and one that left the two women, watching it, breathless and eager.

"Oh, I wish I were a man!" exclaimed Mrs. Vansittart, with clenched fists.

They hurried toward Cornish and White, who were now alone on the path. White had rolled up his sleeve, and was tying his handkerchief round his arm with his other hand and his teeth.

"It is nothing," he said. "One of the devils had a knife. Must get my sleeve mended to-morrow."

CHAPTER XXIII.

A RE-ENFORCEMENT.

"Prends moy telle que je suy,"

WHEN Major White came down to breakfast at his hotel the next morning, he found the large room deserted and the windows thrown open to the sun and the garden. He was selecting a table, when a step on the veranda made him look up. Standing in the window, framed, as it were, by sunshine and trees, was Marguerite Wade, in a white dress, with de

mure lips, and the complexion of a wild rose. She was the incarnation of youth --of that spring-time of life of which the sight tugs at the strings of older hearts; for surely that is the only part of life which is really and honestly worth the living.

Marguerite came forward and shook hands gravely. Major White's left eyebrow quivered for a moment in indication of his usual mild surprise at life and its changing surface.

"Feeling pretty - bobbish ?" inquired Marguerite, earnestly.

White's eyebrow went right up and his glass fell. "Fairly bobbish, thank you," he answered, looking at her with stupendous gravity.

"You look all right, you know."

"You should never judge by appearances," said White, with a fatherly severity.

Marguerite pursed up her lips and looked his stalwart frame up and down in silence. Then she suddenly lapsed into her most confidential manner, like a schoolgirl telling her bosom friend, for the moment, all the truth and more than the truth.

"You are surprised to see me here; thought you would be, you know. I knew you were in the hotel-saw your boots outside your door last night-knew they must be yours. You went to bed very early."

"I have two pair of boots," replied the Major, darkly.

"Well, to tell you the truth, I have brought papa across. Tony wrote for him to come, and I knew papa would be no use by himself, so I came. I told you long ago that the Malgamite scheme was up a gum-tree, and that seems to be precisely where you are." "Precisely."

"And so I have come over, and papa and I are going to put things straight." "I shouldn't, if I were you." "Shouldn't what?" inquired Margue

rite.

"Shouldn't put other people's affairs straight. It does not pay, especially if other people happen to be up a gum-tree -make yourself all sticky, you know."

Marguerite looked at him doubtfully. "Ah!" she said. "That's what-is it?" "That's what," admitted Major White. "That is the difference, I suppose, between a man and a woman," said Mar

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guerite, sitting down at a small table where breakfast had been laid for two. A man looks on at things going—well, to the dogs-and smokes and thinks it isn't his business. A woman thinks the whole world is her business." "So it is, in a sense-it is her doing, at all events."

Marguerite had turned to beckon to the waiter, and she paused to look back over her shoulder with shrewd, clear eyes.

"Ah!" she said, mystically. Then she addressed herself to the waiter, calling him "Kellner," and speaking to him in German, in the full assurance that it would be his native tongue.

"I have told him," she explained to White, "to bring your little coffee-pot and your little milk-jug and your little pat of butter to this table."

"So I understood."

"Ah! Then you know German?" inquired Marguerite, with another doubtful glance.

"I get twopence a day extra pay for knowing German.”

Marguerite paused in her selection of a breakfast roll from a silver basket containing that Continental choice of breads which look so different and taste so much alike.

"Seems to me," she said, confidentially, "that you know more than you appear to know."

"Not such a fool as I look, in fact." "That is about the size of it," admitted Marguerite, gravely. "Tony always says that the world sees more than any one suspects. Perhaps he is right."

And both happening to look up at this moment, their glances met across the little table.

"Tony often is right," said Major White.

There was a pause, during which Marguerite attended to the two small coffeepots for which she had such a youthful and outspoken contempt. The privileges of her sex were still new enough to her to afford a certain pleasure in pouring out beverages for other people to drink.

"Why is Tony so fond of the Hague? Who is Mrs. Vansittart?" she asked, without looking up.

Major White looked stolidly out of the open window for a few moments before answering.

"Two questions don't make an swer."

an

"Not these two questions?" asked Marguerite, with a sudden laugh.

"No; Mrs. Vansittart is a widow, young, and what they usually call 'charming,' I believe. She is clever, yes, very clever; and she was, I suppose, fond of Vansittart; and that is the whole story, I take it."

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Not exactly a cheery story."

"No true stories are," returned the Major, gravely.

But Marguerite shook her head. In her wisdom-that huge wisdom of life as seen from the threshold-she did not believe Mrs. Vansittart's story.

"Yes, but novelists and people take a true story and patch it up at the end. Perhaps most people do that with their lives, you know; perhaps Mrs. Vansittart-"

"Won't do that," said the Major, staring in a stupid way out of the window with vacant, short-sighted eyes. "Not even if Tony suggested it-which he won't do."

"You mean that Tony is not a patch upon the late Mr. Vansittart-that is what you mean," said Marguerite, condescendingly. "Then why does he stay in the Hague?"

Major White shrugged his shoulders and lapsed into a stolid silence, broken only by a demand made presently by Marguerite to the waiter for more bread and more butter. She looked at her companion once or twice, and it is perhaps not astonishing that she again concluded that he must be as dense as he looked. It is a mistake that many of her sex have made regarding men.

"Do you know Miss Roden?" she asked, suddenly. "I have heard a good deal about her from Joan."

chambermaids always burst into your room if you ring the bell, whether the door is locked or not. He is nothing if not respectable, poor old dear-would give points to any bishop in the land."

As she spoke her father came into the room, looking, as his daughter had stated, eminently British and respectable. He shook hands with Major White, and seemed pleased to see him. The Major was, in truth, a man after his own heart, and one whom he looked upon as solid. For Mr. Wade belonged to a solid generation that liked the andante of life to be played in good heavy chords, and looked with suspicious eyes upon brilliancy of execution or lightness of touch.

"I have had a note from Cornish," he said, "who suggests a meeting at this hotel this afternoon to discuss our future

action. The other side have, it appears, written to Lord Ferriby to come over to the Hague." There had in Mr. Wade's life usually been that "other side," which he had treated with a good honest respect so long as they proved themselves worthy of it, but which he crushed the moment they forgot themselves. For there was in this British banker a vast spirit of honest, open antagonism, by which he and his likes have built up a scattered empire on this planet. "At three o'clock," he concluded, lifting the cover of a silver dish which Marguerite had sent back to the kitchen awaiting her father's arrival. "And what will you do, my dear?" he said, turning to her.

"I?" replied Marguerite, who always knew her own mind. "I will take a carriage and drive down to the Villa des Dunes, to see Dorothy Roden. I have a note for her from Joan.”

And Mr. Wade turned to his breakfast with an appetite in no way diminished by the knowledge that the "other side" were about to take action.

At three o'clock the carriage was awaiting Marguerite at the door of the hotel, but for some reason Marguerite lingered in the porch, asking questions, and absolutely refusing to drive all the way to Scheveningen by the side of the "Queen's Canal." When at length she turned to get in, Tony Cornish was coming across the Toornoifeld under the trees; for the Hague is the shadiest city in the world, with forest trees growing amid its great houses.

"Ah!" said Marguerite, holding out

her hand.

You see I have come across to give you all a leg-up. Seems to me we are going to have rather a spree." "The spree," replied Cornish, with his light laugh, "has already begun."

Marguerite drove away towards the Hague wood, and disappeared among the transparent green shadows of that wonderful forest. The man had been instructed to take her to the Villa des Dunes by way of the Leyden Road, making a round in the woods. It was at a point near the farthest outskirts of the forest that Marguerite suddenly turned at the sight of a man sitting upon a bench at the road-side reading a sheet of paper.

"That," she said to herself, "is the Herr Professor-but I cannot remember his name."

Marguerite was naturally a sociable person. Indeed a woman usually stops an old and half-forgotten acquaintance, while men are accustomed to let such bygones go. She told the driver to turn round and drive back again. The man upon the bench had scarce looked up as she passed. He had the air of a German, which suggestion was accentuated by the solitude of his position and the poetic surroundings which he had selected. A German, be it recorded to his credit, has a keen sense of the beauties of nature, and would rather drink his beer before a fine outlook than in a comfortable chair in-doors. When Marguerite returned, this man looked up again with the absorbed air of one repeating something in his mind. When he perceived that she was undoubtedly coming towards himself, he stood up with heels clapped together, and took off his hat. He was a small, squarebuilt man, with upright hair turning to gray, and a quiet, thoughtful, clean-shaven face. His attitude and indeed his person dimly suggested some pictures that have been painted of the great Napoleon. His measuring glance-as if the eyes were weighing the face it looked upon-distinctly suggested his great prototype.

"You do not remember me, Herr Professor," said Marguerite, holding out her hand with a frank laugh. "You have forgotten Dresden and the chemistry classes at Fräulein Weber's?"

"No, Fräulein; I remember those classes," the professor answered, with a grave bow.

"And you remember the girl who dropped the sulphuric acid into the some

thing of potassium? I nearly made a great discovery then, mein Herr."

"You nearly made the greatest discovery of all, Fräulein. Yes, I remember nowFräulein Wade."

"Yes, I am Marguerite Wade," she answered, looking at him with a little. frown, "but I can't remember your name. You were always Herr Professor. And we never called anything by its right name in the chemistry classes, you know; that was part of the er - trick. We called water H.2, or something like that. We called you J.H. U., Herr Professor." "What does that mean, Fräulein?" "Jolly hard up," returned Marguerite, with a laugh, which suddenly gave place, with a bewildering rapidity, to a confidential gravity. You were poor then, mein Herr."

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"I have always been poor, Fräulein, until now."

But Marguerite's mind had flown to other things. She was looking at him again with a frown of concentration.

"I am beginning to remember your name," she said. "Is it not strange how a name comes back with a face? And I had quite forgotten both your face and your name, Herr. . . . Herr.... von Holz"-she broke off, and stepped back from him-" von Holzen," she said, slowly. "Then you are the Malgamite man?"

"Yes, Fräulein," he answered, with his grave smile, “I am the Malgamite man."

Marguerite looked at him with a sort of wonder, for she knew enough of the Malgamite scheme to realize that this was a man who ruled all that came near him, against whom her own father, and Tony Cornish, and Major White, and Mrs. Vansittart, had been able to do nothing-who in the face of all opposition continued calmly to make Malgamite, and sell it daily to the world at a preposterous profit, and at the cost only of men's lives.

"And you, Fräulein, are the daughter of Mr. Wade the banker?"

"Yes," she answered, feeling suddenly that she was a schoolgirl again, standing before her master.

And why are you in the Hague?" "Oh," replied Marguerite, hesitating for perhaps the first time in her life, "to enlarge our minds, mein Herr."

She was looking at the paper he held in his hand, and he saw the direction of her glance. In response, he laughed quietly and held it out towards her.