For some moments Preston did not answer. Then he said: “My darling, I don’t think that. What I think far more likely is that Vera may intentionally have been enlightened concerning her father’s unfortunate infatuation for Mrs. Macmahon, and herself have been blackmailed by the very people who afterwards blackmailed her father, in which case the same scoundrels are indirectly responsible for the death of both father and daughter. More, I now suspect the person or persons who threatened Froissart and his daughter may be the people now threatening us if we refuse to intimidate Cora in the way they wish us to.” Yootha stopped in her walk, staring speechless at her companion. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed at last. “How can such wretches be allowed to live?” Then her imagination began to work with extraordinary rapidity. She thought of Cora’s secret love for Sir Stephen Lethbridge, who had shot himself a year before; of Lord Hope-Cooper, who had drowned himself in the lake of his beautiful park at Cowrie Hall, in Perthshire; of Viscount Molesley, Leonora Vandervelt and others, whose mysterious suicides had so startled London Society, also of the well-known men and women who had, quite recently, ended their lives apparently for no reason. Was it possible all these people had been driven to desperation by the same means and finally in a fit of temporary insanity, destroyed themselves?” Suddenly she caught her breath. Henry Hartsilver, the husband of her friend, Cora--her dearest friend! No breath of scandal concerning him had ever been whispered, and yet---- A sentence she had read in a novel flashed back into her mind: “The private lives of most men are sealed books to all but their companion, or companions, in guilt.” Had Hartsilver’s private life been a sealed book to Cora, whose habit it had been, she remembered, to jest about her husband’s extraordinary respectability? She clutched her lover’s hand, and stopped again in her walk. “Charlie!” she exclaimed in an access of emotion, “if ever, after we are married, you grow tired of me--I want you--I want you to----” Something seemed to choke her, and Preston caught her in his arms. “Yootha, Yootha, my own darling!” he exclaimed huskily. “What are you saying? What are you thinking about? How can you imagine for a single instant I could grow tired of you, the one woman in the world I have ever loved! Don’t say what you were trying to, whatever it may have been. I don’t want to hear it. It pains me when you talk like that, my precious! You don’t--you can’t suppose I should be such a monster as to think of any woman but you?”