‘There is one thing that must be settled before I go back to India,’ said Kenrick. ‘I must give--Miss Harefield--back her money. I cannot carry that burden away with me. You are her guardian and one of her trustees, Vicar. You and Mr. Scratchell must manage the business between you. I can only raise the money by a new mortgage. Would it not be best for Miss Harefield’s trustees to take a mortgage on my estate for the amount they have advanced? I paid the other people only four per cent. I might pay her five.’ ‘I do not think she will take a mortgage. I do not believe she will take her money back in any form whatsoever,’ said the Vicar. ‘She has written me a letter, which I shall show you when you are calmer and more disposed to forgiveness. It is a very touching letter, full of truth and generous feeling. She has treated you very badly--she has been foolish, mistaken; but she is a noble girl, and she is much to be pitied. You will be ungenerous if you insist on giving her back the money. She has more than enough without it.’ ‘I shall be a mean hound if I keep it,’ said Kenrick. CHAPTER X. MRS. PIPER’S DAY. ‘I AM not surprised,’ said Miss Coyle, when she was informed that Beatrix Harefield had gone away, and there was to be no wedding. ‘That unhappy young woman’s guilty conscience has driven her away. A just punishment for Sir Kenrick. Of course he was going to marry her for her money. He knows, as well as I do, that she poisoned her father.’ The wedding was to have been strictly private--altogether different from the imposing ceremonial that had made Bella Scratchell the second Mrs. Piper. There were no guests to be put off at the last moment; there was no confusion anywhere; but there was a great deal of talk in Little Yafford when it became generally known, through Mrs. Pomfret, the pew-opener, that Sir Kenrick’s marriage was not to be. There were various theories as to Beatrix Harefield’s motive for her extraordinary conduct. ‘Guilty conscience,’ said Miss Coyle and her party. ‘A prior attachment,’ said the more charitably inclined. ‘The girl must be wrong in her head,’ said the matter-of-fact matrons and middle-aged husbands, who could not understand the fits and starts of passion. Perhaps in all the neighbourhood there was only one person, except the rival cousins themselves, who guessed the real cause of Miss Harefield’s flight. That person was Mrs. Piper. She knew how deeply Beatrix had loved Cyril, and it hardly surprised her that, at the last moment, she should refuse to consummate a loveless bond. ‘It might have been happier for me if I had run away,’ thought Bella, looking round her apple-green dressing-room, with all the gewgaws Mr. Piper’s generosity had heaped upon her, ‘yet any other life than this would be almost unbearable now.’