CHAPTER I—TENSION.

The road between Oxford and Banbury is the most peaceful of thoroughfares, laid with reasonable directness, gently undulating in parts, passing through quiet villages and a sweet country, mildly beautiful, yet to the mind of Frances Wentworth this innocent highway ever remained, as it were, a section of the broad path to perdition. In after life she never thought of it but with a creepy sensation of horror. She was compelled to traverse ground that was the scene of her lover’s proposal, with the lover whom she had …