She sat spellbound, with a wildly beating heart, until she had read the last of the sixteen provisions of her father's vindictive will.

Though the whole fortune was left absolutely to her, with the exception of twenty-five thousand pounds each to Andrew Fraser and his son, she was tied up by restrictions so infamously brutal, that her three years of minority stretched out before her as a death in life.

Five hundred pounds a year of pin money were allowed to her until her majority, "to be expended with the approval of her guardian." In an agony of lonely sorrow she threw herself, dressed, upon her bed and sobbed herself into forgetfulness, her last cry for help mingling the names of Berthe Louison and Harry Hardwicke.

"Will Justine be true to her oath ?" she faltered, as she drifted into the blessed release of dreamland.
As the night wore on, Justine Delande, tossing on her bed in the Royal Victoria Hotel, waited for the dawn, to sail for Granville.

She had telegraphed in curt words her dismissal, and she burned to reach Geneva, for to her the sight of Alan Hawke's face was the one oasis in her desert of sorrow.
Long after Nadine Johnstone had closed her tired eyelids, stern old Andrew Fraser cowered below, glowering over his library fire, clad in a huge plaid dressing gown.