She said this defiantly, ostentatiously throwing in her lot with the dubious characters from whom Max would fain have dissociated her.

“Do you forget,” he asked, suddenly, “that these precious friends of yours left you, forgot you, for two whole days—­left you to the company of a dead man, to a chance stranger?  Is that what you call kindness—­friendship—­affection?”

She made no answer.

A moment later a voice was heard calling softly:  “Carrie?”

The girl came out of the shelter of the eaves, and Max at last caught sight of her face.  It was sad, pale, altogether different from what the reckless, defiant, rather hard tones of her latest words would have led him to expect.  A haunting face, Max thought.

“I must go,” said she.  “Good-bye.”

“Carrie!” repeated the voice, calling again, impatiently.

Max knew, although he could not see the owner of the voice, that it was “Dick.”  It was, he thought, a coarse voice, full of intimations of the swaggering self-assertion of the low-class Londoner, who thinks himself the whole world’s superior.

Carrie called out: 

“All right; I’m coming!” And then she turned to Max.  “You are to forget this place, and me,” said she, in a whisper.

The next moment Max found himself alone.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SEQUEL TO A TRAGEDY.

It was on the evening after that of his expedition to Limehouse that Max Wedmore found himself back again at the modest iron gate of the park at The Beeches.  He had not sent word what time he should arrive, preferring not to have to meet Doreen by herself, with her inevitable questions, sooner than he could help.

As he shut the gate behind him, and hurried up the drive toward the house, he felt a new significance in the words “Home, Sweet Home,” and shuddered at the recollection that he had, in the thirty odd hours since he left it, given up the hope of ever seeing it again.

It was a little difficult, though, on this prosaic home-coming, to realize all he had passed through since he last saw the red house, with its long, dignified front, its triangular pediment rising up against the dark-blue night sky, and the group of rambling outbuildings, stables, laundries, barns, all built with a magnificent disregard of the value of space, which straggled away indefinitely to the right, in a grove of big trees and a tangle of brush-wood.

Lines of bright light streaming between drawn window curtains showed bright patches on the lawn and the shrubs near the house.  As Max passed through the iron gate which shut in the garden from the park, a group of men and boys, shouting, encouraging one another with uncouth cries, rushed out from the stable yard toward the front of the house.

“What’s the matter?” asked Max of a stable boy, whom he seized by the shoulders and stopped in the act of uttering a wild whoop.