excellent and quite unexpected opportunity for me to get her away.  The woman, I thought, would after a while wake up, and find to her amazement the body gone of her whom she thought dead.  If she had really kidnapped the girl she would be afraid to set any inquiry afoot.  She might even perhaps imagine that the girl’s relations had traced her, found the dead body, and removed it for burial while she, the kidnapper, was asleep.

After a while the expression of terror on the model’s face began to relax, and she soon awoke into that strange condition which had caused Wilderspin to declare that she had been sent from another world.  She recognised me in the semi-conscious way in which she recognised all those who were brought into contact with her, and looked into my face with that indescribably sweet smile of hers.  From the first she had in her dazed way seemed attached to me, and I had now no difficulty whatever in persuading her to accompany me downstairs and out of the house.

Before going, however, the whim seized me to write on the wall in large letters, with a piece of red drawing-chalk I had in my waistcoat pocket, ‘Kidnapper, beware!  Jack Ketch is on your track.’  I took the girl to my house, and put her under the care of my housekeeper (much to the worthy lady’s surprise), who gave her every attention.  I then went to Wilderspin’s studio.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘there is no body lying there, I suppose?’

‘None,’ I said.

’Did I not tell you that the spirit-world had called her back?  What I saw has vanished, as I expected.  How could you suppose that a material body could ever be so beautiful?’

As I particularly wished that the model should, for a time at least, be removed from all her present surroundings, I thought it well to let Wilderspin retain his wild theory as to her disappearance.

I had already arranged to go on the following day to Hurstcote Manor, where several unfinished pictures were waiting for me, and I decided to take the model with me.

Before, however, I started for the country with her, I had the curiosity to call next morning upon the woman in Primrose Court, in order to discover what had been the effect of my stratagem.  I found her sitting in a state of excitement, and evidently in great alarm, gazing at the mattress.  The words I had written on the wall had been carefully washed out.

‘Well, Mrs. Gudgeon,’ I said, ‘what has become of your daughter?’

‘Dead,’ she whimpered, ‘dead.’

‘Yes, I know she’s dead,’ I said.  ‘But where is the body?’

‘Where’s the body?  Why, buried, in course,’ said the woman.

‘Buried?  Who buried her?’ I said.

‘What a question, sure_lie_!’ she said, and kept repeating the words in order, as I saw, to give herself time to invent some story.  Then a look of cunning overspread her face, and she whimpered, ’Who does bury folks in Primrose Court?  The parish, to be sure.’