“How was I to find out? I swore that I would move heaven and earth but that I would unravel the mystery in the end. I need not tell you all my efforts. For long they seemed in vain, utterly, helplessly in vain. At last, my attention was called to a strange fact, and that was that my wife’s maid, Mary Thorne, seemed to be entirely mistress of her. If Clarice ordered her to do anything she did it if she liked, if not it was neglected. I found, too, that Clarice had given her at different times large sums of money. I remonstrated with her, but you remember her pretty, bewitching, caressing ways. She only smiled and told me that she had always spoiled Mary Thorne. But, Hermione, underneath that smile I detected fear, real fear, and I wondered how it was. One day, going quite unexpectedly into my wife’s dressing-room, I heard her ask Mary Thorne to do something and the girl insolently refused. I could not bear that. I spoke sharply and insisted on her instant dismissal, but to my surprise Clarice grew pale with fear. ‘I do not think my mistress will allow me to leave, Sir Ronald,’ said the woman, and she was right. Clarice hung weeping round my neck and begged me not to send away a maid to whom she was much attached, and who was most valuable to her. I yielded to her wish, but from that moment a certain conviction came over me that Mary Thorne knew some secret she was keeping from me. I dare not think the secret concerned that letter, though instinct told me so. I sent for my groom--the one who had taken the letter--and what I discovered was this: The letter was safely delivered, and placed on your toilet-table by your own maid. Mary Thorne, who was engaged in doing something for you at the time, my darling, saw it placed there. Mary was working in your room, she told me, on the day that letter was delivered. You were out, and she sat sewing in your room. While she was there Clarice went in to speak to her, and bending over the toilet-table, saw the letter in my handwriting addressed to you. “Mary told me that she saw Clarice deliberately take up that letter, place it in the pocket of her dress and then quit the room. She returned in half an hour and placed upon the table another envelope, the exact counterpart of the one she had taken away.” CHAPTER LIII. THE SLAVE OF PASSION. They paused in the reading of that confession, and Lord Lorriston, looking at Kenelm, said to him: “This is worse than my darkest dreams ever foreshadowed.” But Kenelm made no reply. He was thinking of the two fair women he had seen lying here dead, both slain by the fatal love of one man. Then they read on: