"If he thinks aught," said the Jesuit, still very gently, to her, "it is that you should never have believed so base a tale. So at least he tells Douglas. To me he has never spoken of the matter." "Alas!" she said. "How could I doubt? Lord Fordingbridge I might have disbelieved, but my father!" and here she shuddered. "How could I think that he would stoop to practise such lies, such duplicity, on his own child?" Father Sholto made no answer to this remark, contenting himself with lifting his hands from his knees and warming the palms at the fire. And so they sat, neither speaking for two or three moments. Then she said: "Father, will you take a letter to him from me?" This time he lifted his bushy eyebrows instead of his hands, and looked at her from underneath them. Next he shrugged his shoulders, and then he said: "Kitty, for you I will do anything, for you who have ever been a dutiful daughter of the Church, ay! and a loyal adherent to a now sadly broken cause. Yet, child, what use to write? Nothing can undo what is done; you must make the best of matters. Solace your wounded heart with the rank you have gained, with your husband's now comfortable means, your reception at the Court of the Hanoverian king, for king he is, and, I fear, must be. However great the evil that was done, it must be borne. You and Bertie Elphinston are sundered for ever in this world, unless----" "Unless?" she repeated, with a swift glance from her eyes. "You both survive him. Yet, how shall such a thing be! He is no older than Elphinston himself, and, much as he has wronged that other, no reparation, not even his life, would set things right. If Bertie slew him he could not marry his victim's widow." "Alas! alas!" said Lady Fordingbridge, "the last thing he would wish to do now, even were I free, would be to have me for his wife. Me whom once he loved so tenderly." Once more the Jesuit twitched up his great eyebrows and muttered something to himself, and then seemed bent in thought. And as Kitty sat watching him she caught disconnected whispers from his lips. "Douglas might do it," she heard him say; "that way the gate would be open. Yet he cannot be spared, not yet," until at last he ceased, after which, looking up from his reverie, he said to her: "What do you wish to write to him, child? You, the Viscountess Fordingbridge, must have a care as to your epistles to unmarried men." "Be under no apprehension," she replied. "Yet, if--if--he would pardon me, would send me one little line to say--God!--that he does not hate me--oh! that he who once loved me so should come to hate me--then, then I might again be happy, a little happy. Father, I must write to him." "So be it," he answered. "Write if you must. I will convey the letter." CHAPTER III. A WOMAN'S LETTER.