She remembered her innocent, ignorant schooldays--when, infected by the foolish talk of frivolous elder girls--they were mostly daughters of rich parents, Joan’s godmother paid for the education which could not be afforded by the poor clergyman and his invalid wife--she was flattered by the admiring gaze of a handsome young man who watched her in church each Sunday from his seat in a neighbouring pew. Schoolgirl talk of him led to chance glances of hers in response. Then came a note artfully dropped by him and picked up by a school friend, delighted to feel herself one of the _dramatis personæ_ in a living loveplay. This and ensuing love-letters proved the young man a clever scribe. He represented himself as a member of a distinguished family, banished from home on account of his political opinions. The secret correspondence continued; then, with the assistance of a bribed housemaid whose mental pabulum was low class novelettes with impossible illustrations of seven feet high countesses and their elongated curly-haired lovers, there were brief, passionate meetings. When Joan was just recovering from her grief at her father’s recent death, the climax came. Her mother died--her lawyers sent for her. When she returned to school, it was with the knowledge that the rich uncle intended to take her from thence, why and for what she did not know; that her godmother acknowledged his right to deal with her future, and that her days in C---- were numbered. With what agony and humiliation she remembered that next wildly emotional meeting with the man she fancied she loved--his passionate pleading that she would be his--her reluctant consent--their meeting in town a few weeks later when she had boldly fled from school to her old nurse in the little suburban house where she let lodgings, and their marriage before the Registrar, to attain which Victor Mercier had falsely stated her age, and their parting immediately after! She went to her uncle somewhat in disgrace because of her precipitate flight from school. But her beauty and the pathos of her orphanhood, also a secret remorse on his part for his hardheartedness to her dead parents, induced him to consider it a girlish freak alone, and to ignore it as such. She had hardly become settled in her new, luxurious home when the blow fell which at first seemed to shatter her whole life at once and for ever. She read in a daily paper of a discovered fraud in the branch office at C---- of a London house, and of the flight and disappearance of the manager, Victor Mercier. To recall those succeeding days and weeks of secret anguish, fear, dread and sickening horror, made her shiver even now. In her desperation she had confided in her old nurse. "But for her, I should have gone mad!" she told herself, with a shudder.