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Pamela drove home from the theatre, as white as a ghost and absolutely silent.

“Tired, darling?” Mrs. Ferguson, her hostess, asked solicitously.

“Yes, a little. It’s been a long day.”

“You must take to-morrow morning in bed. . . . Here you are. Good night, dear child.”

There was a light in Aunt Sophia’s room, and Pamela paused in the passage, irresolute. It was her custom to go in and say good night, no matter how late she returned from parties to which her guardian had not gone, but to-night—if she went in she knew she must blurt everything out, and she believed she wanted to collect her thoughts first. Her brain was whirling. She understood nothing but the one central fact—this man who had been a common sailor, and Heaven knew what else—this mushroom friend of Archie’s with whom she had felt inclined to quarrel every time she saw him—was the son of her Aunt Adelaide and the real Lord Trent—and she was no one at all.

No wonder her brain whirled, for the possibility of her not being the rightful owner of Trent Stoke and the title had never entered her head. Aunt Adelaide had seldom been mentioned in her hearing. She knew vaguely that long ago she had married some dreadfully wicked man, and had died somewhere far away from England; but the cruel husband’s name she had never even heard, and she supposed, if she ever thought about it at all, that