As he realized the full meaning of Lord Kneedrock's amazing statement, the young and unhappy baronet started. His eyes opened very wide and his jaw dropped, leaving his mouth open, too, though not so wide.

"Yes, we're married," Kneedrock continued. "We've been married a long time."

The only thing that could have drowned the sound of the proverbial dropping pin was the low snoring of one of the sleeping dogs.

"It was one of those useful businesses that are managed sometimes," the speaker amplified without any feeling apparently. "Nobody knew. Nobody knows. I went to South Africa, was supposed to have been killed in battle, and Darling came along.

"She married him at the end of a year, and went to India with him. It was about then that I got my memory back. My head was pretty badly knocked about, you see, and for months I didn't know my own name. Of course I heard about it, but I kept my mouth shut and hid myself away in the South Pacific."

Carleigh just stared. It was altogether too much for him to grasp fully. So he had no questions. But Kneedrock kept on:

"So she wasn't exactly the débutante that Darling thought. Naturally, it's all a mess. Everything's a mess. You take my advice and go off with your mother-in-law."

Carleigh was shaking now as if with the ague.

"They call the whole business love," Nibbetts said. "Well, I thank Heaven I had it young! I'm the one man that Nina can't fool. She knows it. I know it. And you know it, too, now.

"Of course she hasn't any claim on me, and I haven't on her. But we shall neither of us ever marry. That's understood. We can't very well. Don't talk about this. Going? Well, then, good-by, old chap! Better go off with Mrs. Veynol. Good-by!"

Carleigh got out somehow. He was faint and giddy. He went to one of his many clubs, and sat there for a long while. Life looked to him a very low, sordid business.

Outside there was fog and mud, slime and filth. And in his heart there was little that was cleaner.

Nina went down to Puddlewood the next week and surprised everybody.

They weren't expecting her in the least. They hadn't heard a word from her or of her, and they didn't know a thing about the skin-grafting and the wonderful success that Pottow, aided by the Andrews cuticle, had made of it.

They were all gathered in the great hall for tea when she arrived, and her entrance was rather dramatic. She insisted that she should not be announced, but permitted to find her way in alone.

The black staghound, Tara, was with her, and at her command he preceded her, bounding into the group with Nina's umbrella gripped in his lean jaws.

Every woman screamed, and every man who was not already standing sprang to his feet.

"God bless my soul!" cried the duke. "How did that beast get here? It's Nina Darling's. There isn't another such in all England."

Lord Waltheof reached for the umbrella, which Tara gave up without protest, and turned with expectant gaze toward the door.

"It's Mrs. Darling's umbrella," said Wally, examining the initials on the silver-gilt handle. "She must be here."

The duchess rose at that, and her gaze joined that of the hound. She and every one else had the same question in mind: "How will she look?" But there was a very trying delay before it was answered.

Nina came running in an instant later; but, to the dismay of the curious, she was thickly and closely veiled.

From this, of course, they drew their own conclusions, just as she wished them to. Every last one of them believed that her face was not fit to be seen.

Every man, without exception, was sorry – deeply sorry; and every woman, without exception, wasn't. Nina's beauty had always been a hard thing to combat.

For the duchess's kiss she lifted her veil the least bit and presented the extreme point of her chin. The duchess, observing closely, noted that it was unmarred, and concluded that it was the only portion of her great-niece's face that was.

"I have been perfectly brutal to all of you," Nina admitted gaily, "but when you hear my story I'm sure you'll all forgive me."

It is hard for most women to forgive a pretty woman, but to forgive a pretty woman who has suddenly become ugly is not so difficult.

They – the women, that is – were disposed to overlook the poor creature's rudeness. The men were always her slaves, so they didn't count. It was the women she had appealed to, anyhow.

"Nina never is brutal," declared the duke. "I say, Doody, haven't I always said – "

But no one was listening, not even the duchess, who rarely failed to confirm him.

"I've had the most awful time with my burns," Nina was hurrying on; "and I hadn't the heart to write letters, talk, or even see any one. I denied myself to everybody."

"Until you were quite all right again, I suppose?" ventured Lady Bellingdown in an effort to draw her.

"Until I got so desperately lonely – so hungry for the faces and voices of my own people – that I should have come to you even without any face at all."

It was an unfortunate choice of phrasing. Every one noticed it and thought of poor Darling. Every one, that is, except Nina herself, to whom the comparison never occurred. She was too occupied in thinking of how Charlotte Grey would look when she saw her without her veil.

"You needn't mind us, of course," said Charlotte just at that minute.

"Oh, I don't!" Nina came back. "I know you'll overlook any blemishes."

"Indeed we will," agreed the duke; "we're all so devilish glad to see you!" He put a hand under her elbow and whispered close to her ear. "Come sit by me. There's some very excellent seed-cake."

Then, laughing, Nina sat down with the duke on her right and Sir George Grey on the other side of her. The three ladies faced her directly. So did Lord Waltheof, who had his customary place behind Kitty Bellingdown's chair.

A footman came in with the tea-things, and Nina glanced around inquiringly. "Isn't Nibbetts here?" she asked, striving to make the question appear casual.

Everybody seemed to look at everybody else, and no one was in any haste to answer. Already the duchess was busy with the cups and saucers.

"Nibbetts has gone to Scotland," Shucks finally told her.

"Is it possible he's still running after his marmalade lass?" she laughed. "You men do have odd tastes."

"Something wrong with Nibbetts – that's a fact," declared his grace bluntly. "Does most unheard-of things."

"I don't understand," she said, turning to him with sudden seriousness. "What unheard-of things, for example?"

But here the duchess intervened. "Do be still, Pucketts. You're very hard on Nibbetts. You always were. He's never been anything but eccentric. Why magnify a phase of it into something extraordinary?"

"Because it is extraordinary," the duke defended. "Fancy a man haunting the tiger-house at the Zoölogical Gardens day after day, and for hours at a stretch! It's not sane, you know."

Nina bent her veiled face closer to him. "Does Hal Kneedrock do that?" she asked.

"He did," was the answer. "I saw him there myself. Others saw him. I say, Doody, didn't I see Nibbetts in the tiger-house?"

"I dare say you did," his wife confirmed. "But what of it?"

"It's very odd, I say. Very odd. It looks like second childhood. The kiddies like to go to the tiger-house."

No one else said a word. But they all seemed most interested, in Nina especially.

"But now he's gone to Scotland, you say?" she asked.

"Yes, to Scotland. Are there any zoölogical gardens in Scotland, I wonder? Doody, are there any zoölogical gardens in Scotland?"

"Nibbetts has gone to Dundee," the duchess returned, pouring tea. "I don't fancy he'll be able to find any tigers there."

"There's a girl there," said Nina. "He told me so. A girl and a parrot. Can you imagine Nibbetts and a romance?" Her laugh rippled through her veil.

Sir George handed her her tea, and she lifted her veil to a point between her nose and her upper lip. The women stared, and so did the men. But there wasn't a scar in sight.

"Do try the seed-cake," urged the duke. "I can recommend it. I can, really."

Nina tried it. A minute later her veil went to the bridge of her nose, which she brushed with a filmy speck of handkerchief.

They all gazed over their cups, and their eyes testified to their astonishment. Her cheeks were of rose-leaf texture, unmarred.

Then, quite casually, she put down her cup and saucer, lifted her arms, got busy with her hands, and – presto! – her hat and veil were off and her whole face bare to where her golden hair swept across her brow.

Charlotte Grey gasped. The duchess and Lady Bellingdown were dumb.

"By gad!" exclaimed Waltheof in a fervor of astonished admiration. "You're more beautiful than ever, Mrs. Darling."

"We fancied you were horribly marked," cried the duke. "We did, really. All purple blotches and that sort of thing. Didn't we, Doody?"

"Speak for yourself, Pucketts," said Doody. "I could never imagine Nina anything but lovely."

Kitty Bellingdown had turned to frown at her cavalier. She regarded his outburst as quite unnecessary and very ill-timed.

Charlotte Grey gasped a second time. Then she said: "I'd be willing to be burned to get a complexion like yours, dear."

"But, you see, I had the foundation to begin on; and I had a friend who was willing to sacrifice something for me," replied Nina sweetly. So sweetly that Charlotte Grey fairly gritted her teeth.

Lady Bellingdown grasped the situation and rushed to the rescue with a change of subject.

"Nina," she said, "did you know that Caryll had returned to his wife?"

Then it was really Mrs. Darling's turn to gasp. "Really!" she exclaimed.

"Yes. He was in England for a week, but never came near us. It seems they had a quarrel over some trifle and he ran away to give her a lesson. Unfortunately it got into the papers."

"I saw it," Nina white-lied valiantly.

"But did you see about Mrs. Veynol?"

"You mean – "

"About her marriage."

"Her marriage? Surely – "

"Yes. She's married for the third time. Now it's a journalist, a sub-editor on one of the cheap and nasty society weeklies. Fancy!"

"Ah, that cleared the way, then. Caryll would never have gone back otherwise."

"You think that?"

"I know it. He told me as much."

"You mean you saw him – saw him the week he was here?"

Nina colored faintly. She had not meant to tell.

"Yes," she answered. "He came to me at Bath. He wanted me to save him. He couldn't quite decide between the pair of them, so he wished to compromise on me."

Lady Bellingdown nearly boiled over.

"He's a most ungrateful boy," she cried. "He must have known how anxious we all were about you, and he never sent me a line. Only a wire that he had returned to Nice and Rosamond."

"If he – " Nina began, and finished with: "He might have said Rosamond and Nice. Don't you think so? It's straws, you know – "

After dinner that evening Nina got the duke alone in a corner.

"Tell me more about Hal Kneedrock," she begged, taking the clawlike ducal hand in both her own. "Is there anything really wrong, do you think?"

His grace, out of ear-shot of the duchess, didn't mince matters. "Mad as a hatter," he said earnestly. "Brain gone all to pieces over something. No doubt about it. Poor old Nibbetts!"

"But how? What has he done except haunt the tiger-house?"

"Nothing. But the way he haunts it. There all day, you know, from opening to close, every day of the week."

"That's an odd mania. Can't anything be done? Has any one talked with him?"

"Yes," answered the duke. "His man. Bellingdown and I saw his man and told him what was up. We asked him to keep his master in sight and see that no harm came to him. Just that. But the beggar exceeded his instructions. He let Kneedrock see him and then he tried to argue him out of his habit."

"And what did Hal say?"

"He didn't say; he acted. He beat the poor fellow up most fearfully. Went into a towering rage, in fact."

"And now nobody'll speak to him about it, I suppose," cried Nina indignantly. "You men are such cowards."

"No, no, no," the duke protested. "It isn't that, my child. It isn't really. But, you see, it's a most delicate matter. He probably has some reason for going there that in his own mind seems perfectly right and proper."

"Then, after all, why interfere?"

"Because he's attracting attention. Or was. Of course, he's not now. He's in Dundee, you know."

"Yes. I've heard that. When he comes back perhaps he won't go to the tiger-house any more."

His grace adjusted his monocle and carefully examined his three massive rings of yellow gold, handsomely set with jewels.

"If he does there'll be trouble," he said quietly.

"But if he's not creating a disturbance?"

"Ah, but he is. That's just it. He collects a crowd."

"How?"

The duke hesitated. "I suppose it's this that Kitty was afraid I'd tell you. You've been through a lot of nervous strain, with the fire and things, and she wanted to save you. I can see it."

Nina naturally was doubly interested. "You've gone too far now to turn back," she said. "You must tell me the rest. I have a right to know all."

"Well, it's this way" – the duke dropped his glass and turned to her, his voice very low – "it's just one cage that he's a penchant for. He stands before it, or paces up and down before it continuously." Then he paused.

Nina was growing annoyed. "What of it?" she asked.

"You know that story he's always telling you – that you're a reincarnated tigress. Well, this is the cage of a tigress."

"I think you are all very silly," she declared. "Fancy connecting the two facts! He's probably doing it on a wager – or been doing it." But she was disturbed, nevertheless.

"The tigress is a very handsome beast," continued the duke, "and – you may as well have the worst of it – he talks to her. He mumbles under his breath. Sometimes it's a tone that is most adoring, and again he berates her scandalously. And, Nina, you'd never imagine it, but it's quite true – the creature seems to understand."

Then she laughed nervously. "No," she said. "I won't believe that. It's too silly for words. I'm surprised at you, Pucketts, taking such a thing seriously. Nibbetts has been playing a joke on you. And your imagination has done the rest. I never heard such ridiculous folderol in all my life."

She stood up and started to move away, but the duke was by her side.

"There's one thing he says that is quite plain," he continued. "I heard it and Bellingdown heard it. We were there beside him, and he didn't so much as see us. He was blind to everything except that great, lithe, purring she-cat."

Nina turned to him. In spite of her little speech of repudiation she was all a-quiver from head to feet. "What was it?" she asked.

"He was calling the beast Nina."

CHAPTER XXVII
Reason Tottering on Its Throne

After three nervously anxious days Nina Darling journeyed back to London and reopened her flat at Mayfair – a very different Nina indeed from the frolicsome Nina who went to Puddlewood to display her restored beauty.

The duke's story concerning Kneedrock had distressed her woefully. As a girl, in spite of her high-spirited independence and honey-bee proclivity of sipping sweets where she found them, she had loved him deeply, and since his return from self-banishment – since the one great tragedy of her life at Umballa – she had found in him her sole rock of dependence. Stubborn – cruel often at times as he was – she nevertheless felt and knew that while he reprobated and deplored her seeming lightness of character, yet deep in his soul he still held her very dear.

From what she had learned – but which she still hoped to prove grossly exaggerated – she was now more than ever convinced that this was true.

How profoundly he had been stirred and hurt by her wilful follies this awful climax – oh, it couldn't, it must not be true – demonstrated as nothing else, either word or action, could possibly have done.

Selfishly, for her own passing pleasure, she had driven men to intemperance, to exile, to self-destruction even; and now, as a fitting culmination in lex talionis– the one strong man of all, the king, the god she worshiped, had succumbed, they told her, in more awful plight than any of the others.

In her extremity Nina wired to Bath, bidding Gerald Andrews come to her at once. Then she sat down and waited.

He came by the first train, yet the intervening time seemed endless. And he found her pale and haggard, with purple crescents beneath dull, tired eyes; for in twenty-four hours she had neither eaten nor slept. It was nine o'clock at night, and the rain, driven by an east wind, was beating against the windows like an avalanche.

"Gerald," she greeted, giving him the tips of cold fingers, "you are so good. I need you terribly."

"You are ill," he said at once. "What have you been doing?"

She told him briefly what she had heard.

"It is the uncertainty," she added. "It's killing me. If I could only be sure – one way or the other – I – " Her voice quavered.

"Have you dined?" he interrupted.

"No; I'm not hungry. I haven't thought of eating."

"But you must," he urged. "You must keep up your strength. Unless you do I shall refuse to help you."

"I've no appetite," she said. "I hunger only for facts – for the truth."

"Then you must prepare for it. It may be too strong for an empty stomach."

But this only alarmed her. "You know?" she cried hysterically. "You know something already?"

"Nothing," he answered – "nothing at all. Only – well, the fact is, I haven't dined, either. I came straight here from the station. Could you – "

"You poor boy!" she broke in. "Of course. Please touch the bell. There; behind you."

"Won't you come out with me?"

"No; I couldn't; besides, listen to the rain, and – and I'm not dressed, you see."

"You don't want me to go alone?"

"Oh, no, no, no," she protested. "I have so much to say – "

"Very well. I'll stop, and I'll eat; but on one condition. You must eat, too."

"I can't," she insisted. "I can't, really. I'd choke."

"Try it," he insisted, in turn. "If you choke I'll let you off."

There was consommé, and there were chops – done to a turn – and a cobwebbed bottle of Pommard. Of the wine Andrews forced her to sip the better part of a glass, and was rewarded by a faint show of color in her lips and cheeks.

It stimulated her appetite, too, and she managed to swallow a few spoonfuls of the soup and a little lean, red meat of a chop. After which he called her a brave girl and assured her that there was nothing he wouldn't do for her in return.

"I want you, the very first thing in the morning, to go to Regent's Park," she said. "I want you to go where the tigers are, and to ask questions of the guards. They can can tell you whether it is true that a gentleman has been there recently, acting strangely."

"I'll be there when the gates open," returned Gerald. "What else?"

"If you find it is true – which I hope to Heaven you don't – I want you to go to Lord Kneedrock's solicitor and learn what he knows about it. You may tell him you came from me, and that I desire some steps taken."

He looked at her questioningly. He couldn't understand her right to make such a demand, but he said nothing, except:

"Who is Lord Kneedrock's solicitor?"

"A combined mummy and sphinx," she answered. "His name is Widdicombe, and he has chambers in the Inner Temple. Your real task will be to get him to open his mouth. He's a living storehouse of secrets."

"Won't your name open it?"

"The name of his majesty wouldn't open it unless he felt it to be for his client's interest. I'm afraid you'll find him a very hard nut to crack, Gerald."

"If I fail, it won't be for lack of effort," he declared determinedly.

Then she smiled at him in the old way for the first time since he came.

"How are the sheep and the ewe lambs?" she asked, with a faint sign of mischief.

He smiled in return, pleased to note the change in her, even if it were but momentary.

"Safe in fold to-night, I hope," he answered, as a gust of wind blew the rain in vicious volleys against the panes.

"Tell me," she said presently. "How did Lord Kneedrock look the day you saw him at Bath?"

"Vexed," he answered. "Beastly angry, in fact."

"I'm sure he did. It was unkind of me not to see him, and to make an exception of you."

"That's altogether a matter of viewpoint. I think it was most kind."

"Of course you do. Men are all selfish animals."

"I think that is unkind," he said reprovingly. "I'm not selfish where your happiness is concerned. I'd go to the ends of the earth to serve you, Nina."

"With another man left behind?"

"Yes. Even with another man left behind."

"That's what Kneedrock did," she told him. "And – and I can never forget it."

"And he can never forgive it," Andrews added.

Then he went away, and Nina passed another sleepless night.

But he was back the next day by noon, to find her sitting in the same chair, with Tara lying at her feet, and the rain still beating its dismal tattoo on the window-panes. The room was in dusk.

She saw in his face that what she had feared, yet hoped against, he had brought her. She needed no word to confirm the dire thing told her by the duke. Poor Andrews seemed weighed down by the burden of his tidings. His expression was as grim and dour as the day.

"But do they know who he is?" It was her first question, and it relieved him of the bald announcement he had dreaded.

"They don't," he answered quickly, glad to get the first plunge over. "They haven't the faintest notion, apparently. I asked particularly."

"Poor Nibbetts," Nina sighed. "He doesn't look the typical nobleman. Yet when he was a young man there wasn't a smarter in all London."

"That South Sea life took it out of him, I suppose."

"And the butchering the Boers gave him."

"I wonder if his present fix can't be traced back to that?" suggested her friend, leaning down and patting the staghound's head. "There's such a thing as traumatic insanity, you know."

She seemed to seize on this alternative possibility with eagerness.

"He has never been the same since he came back," she said. "That is certain. He was quite, quite different before he went to South Africa."

Then a question occurred to her, and she asked: "Has he shown any violence?"

"Not at the gardens. But they had heard of an assault he made outside the gates."

"Yes, I know. He attacked his valet for following him and daring to interfere."

"He has been very quiet in the tiger-house – except for that mumbling talk of his to the tigress. But that attracts attention – collects a crowd, you know – and they have to ask him to move on."

"And does he?"

"Oh, yes! Very peaceably. But he's back again in a little while, and then the same thing has to be repeated."

"Poor Hal!" sighed Nina, her locked hands tightly gripped.

"They hope he has gone away to stay, one of the guards told me. Ever since the row outside, they fear he may indulge in some outbreak in the grounds. There is talk of refusing him admission."

"If they only would," she said. And then, abruptly: "But you haven't told me of Mr. Widdicombe. Did you see him?"

Gerald smiled. "Yes, oh yes," he answered. "I saw him. But you were right. He wouldn't talk. He wouldn't open his mouth."

"He just sat dumb?"

"He turned to his desk and touched a bell. A clerk came and – that was all."

"You told him that I wished to know?" There was something imperious in her emphasis.

"I did – yes." And again he questioned why that should bear any weight. Although he did not voice it, she read it in his look.

"I'm his near kin, you know," she explained. "We are cousins."

"I understand," he told her, but he thought the explanation far short of adequate.

She got up and crossed the room, and from a drawer in an escritoire took out a small photograph, which she passed to Andrews.

"That was taken in 1900," she said.

It was easy to recognize her in the slender, tallish girl, with masses of fair hair, and clad in the simplest of white frocks. But he would never have known the slim young man with the waxed mustache for Lord Kneedrock, had she not told him. He wore outing flannels and a blazer of wide stripes, and his arm was about her youthful shoulders.

"It was taken at Henley," she said, "just for a lark. Look at the back."

He turned it over and found written there in pencil: "'Arry and his 'Arriet," in a man's hand.

"Hal used always to call me Harriet," she explained, and in spite of her, her voice shook.

He looked at her sharply as he handed it back, remembering just then a certain night in Simla when she told him that she had met her match and her mate in one.

"Does Widdicombe know about this?" he asked.

"I very much doubt that there is anything in Lord Kneedrock's life which Mr. Widdicombe doesn't know," was her answer.

She returned to her chair, but Gerald Andrews remained standing. "Is there anything else I can do?" he inquired. "If not, I'll – "

"You can stay for luncheon," she interrupted.

He thanked her, but declined.

"I've a little business to look after while I'm up," he added, "and I should be back in Bath to-night."

"You've been so good," she said, giving him her hand. "I shall miss you awfully. You'll be up again soon, won't you, Gerald?"

The door-bell echoed, and at the same instant Tara lifted his head and growled. Neither seemed to notice.

The man drew her closer and placed his disengaged hand on her shoulder.

"I'd give the world, Nina," he said, "to make this thing lighter for you. If I could only help in some real way!"

"You do; you do," she assured him. "Your sympathy is everything to me."

There was a step in the passage, but neither heard it. For it was at that moment that he caught her almost roughly in his arms and crushed her close to him.

And then the door opened, and Kneedrock was gazing at them from the threshold.