"It is, as I know now. Though not until to-night, when Anne told me all and enabled me to put one thing with another. And to-morrow," she continued, "I will show you her letters to me. Short of saying what the name of the man whom she loved was, she has told me all." In the morning she did as she had said she would, and put in her husband's hands a small packet of letters which he read later, not without a man's compassion for the wrecked love of the unhappy pair, and with, too, much, doubt upon his part as to whether these letters from one woman to another should not have been sacred from any man's eyes. Yet, also, ere he had concluded the perusal, he understood that it was well that Ariadne had shown them to him. For in these letters the whole story was narrated, as Granger had briefly told it to Anne overnight in the "Red Rover"; the story of the girl's mad love for the handsome young lieutenant and of his for her; of the delirious bliss of the earliest days of that love; days full of softest wishes and tenderest fears and hopes of happy years to come. Of happy years with him who, so cold to and disdainful of all others, was to her a slave--a slave, but a loving one! Then, while Geoffrey read on--knowing that, as he did so, the tears were in his eyes--the tale was told of how the blow had fallen; of how the man she loved was ruined and disgraced; and that he had committed a crime which would drive him forth from the society of all honest men, and out of the service he belonged to--nay! worse, might bring him to the gallows. Yet she saved him, saved him at last, at the cost of her own happiness in this world; by the perdition of her own soul. The man he had robbed, or attempted to rob, was, by Fortune's favour, one who had wooed her long and unsuccessfully; now he would spare him upon one condition. The condition that she resigned the man she loved, and wedded the man who loved her. "And then," the last letter went on, "oh! my God, then, Ariadne, when I had been Lord Glastonbury's wife for six months, we learnt that the man I had loved was innocent, and that he was the tool of a designing villain. We learnt it through a letter written to my husband by a woman who had been the friend of that villain and was cognizant of the robbery he was meditating; by a woman who, discarded and cast off, had found means to communicate with Glastonbury, she imagining that the theft had succeeded. And, darling," the unhappy writer concluded, "my husband, though dissolute, is an honourable man; if he could find my unhappy lover he would tell him all, he would send him that woman's letter. It might yet go far to restore him to his proper place in the world. Meanwhile, he intends to write to the Lords of the Admiralty." Geoffrey called Ariadne to him when he had finished the perusal of the letters, and told her that he had done so; then he said quietly--