Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 February 1916 — The THOUSANDTH WOMAN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The THOUSANDTH WOMAN

By ERNEST W. HORNUNG

Author of Ghe AMATEUR CRACKSMAN, PAFFIFS Etc frustrations so, o. rrewizN myers IU-U j PQPDJ cowe/usy-

SYNOPSISCaxakt. ou the steamer Kaiser Frits, feomeward bound from Australia, cries ••ut in his sleep that Henry Craven, who .Sen years before had ruined his father and himself, is dead and finds that HilSon Toy#. who shares the stateroom with Wtm, knows Craven and also Blanche wacnalr, a former neighbor and playmate. When the dally papers come aboard at Southampton Toye reads that Craven has been murdered and calls Cazalet’s dream second sight. He thinks «f doing a little amateur detective work •n the case himself. In the train to town •they discuss the murder, which was comput'd at Cazalet’s old home. Toye hears from Cazalet that Scruton. who had been ICazalet's friend and the scapegoat for Craven’s dishonesty, has been released twin prison. Cazalet goes down the jltver and meets Blanche.

CHAPTER IV—Continued. *T wonder who can have done It!" “So do the police, and they don't much like finding out! ” “It must have been for his watch 'and money, don’t you think? And yet [they say he had so many enemies!” iCazalet kept silence; but she thought ihe winced. "Of course It must have Ibeen the man who ran out of the •drive," she concluded hastily. “Where |vrere you when It happened, Sweep?”

Somewhat hoarsely he was recalltug the Mediterranean movements of -the Kaiser Fritz, when at the first of the vessel’s name he was flrmly heckled. “Sweep, you don’t mean to say you ■came by a German steamer?” “I do. It was the first going, and rwhy should I waste a week? Besides, tyou can generally get a cabin to your•elf on the German line.”

“So that’s why you’re here before ■the end of the month," said Blanche. “Well, I call It most unpatriotic; but the cabin to yourself was certainly «ome excuse.” “That reminds me!” he exclaimed. J“I hadn’t it to myself all the way; there was another fellow in with me from Genoa; and the last night on ’Board it came out that he knew you!”

“Who can it have been?” his name was. Hilton Toye.” “An American man! ' Oh, but I know him very well,” said Blanche in * tone both strained and cordial. “He’s great fun, Mr. Toye, with his delightful Americanisms, and the perfectly delightful way he says them!” Cazalet puckered like the primitive nan he was, when taken at all by sur>rise; and that anybody, much less 'Blanche, should think Toye, of all people, either “delightful” or “great fun” ■was certainly a surprise to him, if it •was nothing else. Of course It was *othing else, to his immediate knowledge; still, he was rather ready to think that Blanche was blushing, but ilorgot, if indeed he had been in a fit state to see it at the time, that she Bad paid himself the same high compliment across the gate. On the whole, it may be said that Cazalet was ruffled without feeling seriously disturbed as to the essential issue which alone leaped to his mind. “Where did you meet the fellow?” Be inquired, with the suitable admixture of confidence and amusement. “In the first instance, at Engelberg.” “Engelberg! Where’s that?” “Only one of those places in Switzerland where everybody goes nowadays for what they call winter sports ” She was not even, smiling at his arrogant ignorance; she was merely explaining one geographical point and another of general information. A close observer might have thought Ber almost anxious not to identify herself too closely with a popular craze.

“I dare say you mentioned it,” said Cazalet, but rather as though he was wondering why she had not. “I dare say I didn’t! Everything won’t go into an annual letter. It was the winter before last—l went out with Betty and her husband.” “And after that he took a place down here?” “Yes. Then I met him on the river the following summer, and found he’d got rooms in one of the Nell Gwynne Cottages, if you call that a place.” “I see.”

But there was no more to see; there ■ever had been much, but now Blanche was standing up and gazing •ut of the balcony into the belt of singing sunshine between the opposite side of the road and the invisible river acres away.

“Why shouldn’t we go .down to Littleford and get out the boat If you’re really going to make an afternoon of tt?" she said. “But you simply must see Martha first; and while she’s making herself fit to be seen, you must take something for the good of the house. I'll bring it to you on a lordly tray.” She brought him siphon, stoppered bottle, a silver biscuit-box of ancient memories, and left him alone .with them some little time; for the young mistress, like her old retainer In anether minute, wasslmplydyingtp make herself more presentable. Yet when she had done so, and came back like snow, in a shirt and skirt just home from the laundry, she saw that he did not see the difference. His despairing eyes shone neither more nor lees; but he had also devoured every

biscuit in the box, though he had begun by vowing that he had lunched in town, and stuck to the fable still. Old Martha had known him all his Sife, but best at the period when he used to come to nursery tea at Littleford. She declared she would have known him anywhere as he was, but she simply hadn’t recognised him in that photograph with his beard. "I can see where it's been," said Martha, looking him in the lower temperate zone. “But I’m so glad you’ve had it off, Mr. Cazalet."

“There you are, Blanchie!" crowed Cazalet. “You said she’d be disappointed, But Martha’s got better taste.” “It isn’t that, sir,” said Martha earnestly. “It’s because the dreadful man who was seen running out of the drive, at your old home, he had a beard! It’s in all the notices about him, and that’s what’s put me against them, and makes me glad you’ve had yours oft.” Blanche turned to him with too ready a smile; but then she was really not such a great age as she pretended, and she had never been in better spirits in her life.

“You hear, Sweep! _...1 call It rather lucky for you that you were—" But just then she saw his face, and remembered the things, that had been said about Henry Craven by the Cazalets’ friends, even ten years ago, when she really had been a girl.

CHAPTER V. An Untimely Visitor. She really was one still, for In these days it is an elastic term, and in Blanche’s case there was no apparent reason why it should ever cease to appT}’, or to be applied by every decent tongue except her own. Much the best tennis-player among the ladies of the neighborhood, she drove an almost unbecomingly long ball at golf, and never looked better than when paddling her old canoe, or punting In the old punt. And yet, this wonderful September afternoon, she did somehow look even better than at

either or any of those congenial pursuits, and that long before they reached the river; in the empty house, which had known her as baby, child and grown-up’girl, to the companion of some part of all three stages, she looked a more lustrous and a lovelier Blanche than he remembered even of old.

But she was not really lovely in the least; that also must be put beyond the pale of misconception. Her hair was beautiful, and perhaps her skin, and, in some lights, her eyes; the rest, was not It was yellow hair, not golden, and Cazalet would have given all he had about him to see it down again as in the oldest of old days; but there was mpre gold in her skin, for so the sun had treated it; and there was even hint or glint (in certain lights, be It repeated) of gold mingling with the pure hazel of her eyes. But in the dusty shadows of the empty house, moving like a sunbeam across its bare boards, standing out against the discolored walls in the place of remembered pictures not to be compared with hpr, it was there that she was all golden and still girl. *• They poked their noses into, and

they had a laugh in every corner and so out upon the leafy lawn, shelving abruptly to the river. Last of all there was the summer schoolroom over the boat-house, quite apart from the house itself; scene of such safe yet reckless revels; in its very aura late Victorian! It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now neglected path; the bow-win-dows overlooking the river were framed in ivy, like three matted, whisits' lower sash propped open by a broken plant-pot, might have been grinning a toothless welcome to two oriee leading spirits of the place., Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged that sash up altogether; then he sat himself on the sill, his long legs ip-

side. But his knife had reminded him of his plug tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him as straight back to the bush as though the unsound floor had changed under their feet into a magic carpet. “Yom simply have it put down to the man’s account in the station books. Nobody keeps ready money up at the bush, not even the price of a plug like this; but the chap l’m telling you about (I can see him now, with his great red beard and freckled fists) he swore I was charging him for half a pound more than he’d ever had. We fought for twenty minutes behind the wood-heap; then he gave me best, but I had to turn In till I could see again.” “You don’t mean that he —>” Blanche had looked rather disgusted the moment before; now she was all truculent suspense and indignation.

“Beat me?" he cried. "Good Lord, no; but there was none too much in it.” Fires died down in her hazel eyes, lay lambent as soft moonlight, flickered into laughter before he had seen the fire. “I’m afraid you’re a very dangerous person,” said Blanche. “You’ve got to be," he assured her; “it's the only way. Don’t take a word from anybody, unless you mean him to wipe his boots on you. I soon found that out I’d have given something to have learned the noble art before 1 went out. Did I ever tell you how it was I first came across old Venus Potts?"

He had told her at great length, to the exclusion of about every other topic, in the second of the annual letters; and throughout the series the inevitable name ’of Venus Potts had seldom cropped up without some allusion to that Jlomeric encounter. But it was well worth while having it all over again with the intricate and picaresque embroidery of a ‘tongue far mightier than the pen hitherto employed upon the incident. Poor Blanche had aimpst to hold her nose over the primary cause of battle; but the dialogue was delightful, and Cazalet himself made a most gallant and engaging figure as he sat on the sill and reeled it out. Twenty minutes later, and old Venus Potts was still on the magic tapis, though Cazalet had dropped his boasting for a curiously humble, eager and yet Ineffectual vein. “Old Venus Potts!" he kept ejaculating. “You couldn’t help liking him. And he’d like you, my word!" “Is his wife nice?” Blanche wanted to know; but she was looking so in-

tently out her window, at the opposite end of the bow to Cazalet’s, that a man of the wider world might have thought of something else to talk about. Out her window she looked past a willow that had been part of the old life, in the direction of an equally typical silhouette of patient anglers anchored in a punt; they had not raised a rod between them during all this time that Blanche had been out in Australia; but as a /natter of fact she never saw them, since, vastly to the credit of Cazalet’s descriptive powers, she was out in Australia stilt “Nelly Potts?” he said. “Oh, a jolly good sort; you’d be awful pals.”

“Should we?" said Blanche, just smiling at her invisible anglers. “I know you would,” he assured her with immense conviction. “Of course she can’t do the things you do; but she can ride, my word! So she ought to, when she’s lived there all her life. The rooms aren’t much, but the verandas are what count most; they’re better than any rooms.” • She was still out there, cultivating Nelly Potts on a very deep veranda, though her straw hat and straw hair remained in contradictory evidence against a very dirty window on the Middlesex bank of the Thames. It was a shame of the September sun to show the dirt as it was doing; not only was there a great steady pool of sunshine on the unspeakable floor, but a doddering reflection from the river on the disreputable celling. Cazalet looked rather desperately from one to the other, and both the calm pool and the rough were broken by shadows, one more impressionistic than the other, of a straw hat over a stack of straw hair, that had net gone out to Australia —yet.

And of course just then a step sounded outside somewhere on some gravel. Con found those caretakers! What were they doing, prowling about? - . "I say, Blanchle!” he blurted out. “I do believe you’d like It out there, a sportswoman like you! 1 believe you’d take to it like a duck to water.” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

“Where Did You Meet the Fellow?” He inquired.