“It would be a good thing for you—­you have sown wild oats enough, Louis, and it is time that you began to think of settling down in life.  If you please me you know that a brilliant future awaits you, for you are my only heir,” Mrs. Montague concluded, as she searched his face earnestly.

“My dear Aunt Margie, you well know there is nothing I like to do better than to please you,” was the gallant response, and Mrs. Montague believed him, and smoothed her ruffled plumage.

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Louis Hamblin remarked later, while smoking his cigar by himself, “I shall try to see more of that pretty seamstress, without regard to the McKenzie expectations.  Jove! what eyes she has! and her low ‘thank you,’ as I let her in, had the most musical sound I’ve heard in many a day.  Stay,” he added, with a start, “now I think of it, she must be the same girl to whom those proud upstarts gave the cut direct in Macy’s the other day.  I thought her face was familiar, and didn’t she pull herself together gloriously after it.  There’s a romance connected with her, I’ll bet.  She must have been in society, or she could not have known them well enough to salute them as she did.  Really, Miss Ruth Richards grows more and more interesting to me.”

CHAPTER XI.

RAY’S EXPERIENCE.

While Mona was plodding her monotonous way among sheets and pillow-slips, table linen and dressmaking, in Mrs. Montague’s elegant home, Raymond Palmer was also being subjected to severe discipline, although of a different character.

We left him locked within a padded chamber in the house of Doctor Wesselhoff, who was a noted specialist in the treatment of diseases of the brain and nerves.

It will be remembered that Ray had been hypnotized into a profound slumber, from which he did not awake for many hours.

When at last he did arouse, he was both calmed and refreshed, while he was surprised to find that a small table, on which a tempting lunch was arranged, had been drawn close beside the lounge where he lay.

He was really hungry, and arose and began to partake with relish of the various viands before him, while, at the same time, he looked about the artfully constructed chamber he was in with no small degree of curiosity.

He remembered perfectly all that had occurred from the time he left his father’s store in company with the charming Mrs. Vanderbeck until he had been so strangely over-powered with sleep by the influence of those masterful eyes, which had peered at him through an aperture in the wall.

As his mind went back over the strange incidents of the day he began to experience anew great anxiety over the loss of the rare stones which had been so cleverly stolen from him, and also regarding the fate in store for him.

He knew that the diamonds were in his pocket when the carriage stopped before the house, for he had not removed his hand from the package until Mrs. Vanderbeck discovered that her dress had been caught in the door of the carriage.