He left the seat on the river-bank, and strolled slowly homeward by a different path from that Mr. Jerningham had taken. His reperusal of the book had been upon one point conclusive to him. The few details of the scene had told him at first that it had been laid in the British dominions. Reflection convinced him that Scotland was the locality of that solitary mountain habitation where his mother’s sad days had been spent. _This_ had been Celia’s unknown power. This habitation upon Scottish soil was the hold which she had possessed over her lover. In the character of his wife he had brought her to Scotland, and there had made his domicile with her during a period of several months; and by the right of that Scottish home, that open acknowledgment, she _was_ his wife. She had fled from him, unconscious of this. But if she had been conscious of this power, her son told himself that she would have been too noble to use it; too proud to call herself a wife by favour of a legal quibble. “I will talk it over with Uncle Dan,” Eustace said to himself; “and if he and I are agreed upon the subject, I will go to Scotland and hunt out the scene, supposing that to be possible from so slight a clue as this book will give us.” He knew that by the law of Scotland he was in all probability legitimatized; but not for the wealth of Scotland would he have sought to establish such a claim upon that nameless father, whom of all men that ever lived upon this earth he most despised. “He abandoned her to lonely self-upbraiding, long, dreary days of remorse, humiliation, sorrow past all comfort--the thought of the sorrow her sin had wrought for those she loved. He let her bear this bitter burden without one effort to lighten or to share it. He deserted the woman he had destroyed, because--she did not amuse him. Is this what wealth, and polite letters, and civilization make of a man? God forbid! Such a man should have worn imperial purple, and died the imperator’s common death in the days of Rome’s decadence. He is an anachronism in a Christian age.” He walked slowly back to the cottage, where he had but just time to dress for dinner. The evening passed quietly. Of the four people assembled in M. de Bergerac’s drawing room, three were singularly quiet and thoughtful. The summer dusk favoured silent meditation. Mr. Jerningham sat apart in a garden-chair under the long, rustic verandah, half-curtained with trailing branches of clematis and honeysuckle; Eustace sat in the darkest corner of the low drawing-room, where Helen occupied herself in playing dreamy German melodies upon her piano. M. de Bergerac strolled up and down before the lawn, stopping every now and then to say something to his friend Harold Jerningham.