"Le diable n'est pas si noir que l'on dit," runs the idiomatic saying in France. We have it also in English, as the world of course knows; but it sounds better, that is, less wrong, to give it in the former language. We girls at school there said it often; had one of us ventured on the English sentence at Miss Fenton's, that lady's eyes would have grown round with horror. It might be applied to Mr. Edwin Barley. Looking back dispassionately, bringing reason to bear on the retrospect, I could not trace one single act or word in him that would justify me in having thought him so bad a man. Taking the colouring from my first view of him, when his dark and certainly ugly face peeped out from the avenue at Hallam, frightening me terribly; and from the dreadful events that followed, in which my childish imagination mixed him up as the worst actor, this prejudice had lived and grown in my mind. He had really done nothing to merit it. There was the abstracted will, but it was not proved that he had taken it; probably he had not. I had been too young to realize the terrible blow brought upon him through George Heneage. And, as we got to know later, the vindictive feeling with which he had pursued him all through these years had its rise in self-defence as well as in a desire to inflict punishment. The semi-doubt cast, or to himself seeming to be cast, on Mr. Edwin Barley at the time, in the remarks that he had been the only one to profit, and that largely, by Philip King's death, had rankled in his mind, implanting there a burning anxiety, apart from other considerations, to bring to light the real criminal. For his own part, he had never for a moment doubted that it had been intentional, deliberate, cruel murder. And I have grown to think that the exaggeration he imparted to Philip King's dying words arose unwittingly in the confusion of the moment; that he was not conscious he did so exaggerate. A passive listener hears words more clearly than an actor. Altogether, the "diable" was not so black as my fancy had painted him; indeed, I began, as days went on, to doubt whether the word would apply to Mr. Edwin Barley at all. One does not grow wise in an hour; no, nor even in a year: youth clings to its prejudices, and it takes experience and age, and sober judgment, to subdue them. Mr. Edwin Barley went home after quitting Chandos. Seated there, her things off, and a luncheon tray before her, with no trace of her luggage to be seen, was Charlotte Delves—Mrs. Penn of late years. Was she intending to take up her present quarters at his house? the question mentally occurred to Mr. Edwin Barley, and it did not tend to his gratification. Not if he knew it; he had not been upon cordial terms with Charlotte Delves for years; and what he had now heard of her line of conduct at Chandos vexed him.