Friends had rallied--too many rather than too few--round the unfortunate girl; but her best friends, those to whom she felt she owed the greatest gratitude, were a certain Richard Maule, one of the trustees of her small fortune, and Richard Maule's wife, Athena. Mr. Maule, at the time of the tragedy already an invalid, had been able to do nothing in an active sense, but his country house, Rede Place, had immediately become, whenever she chose that it should be so, Miss Oglander's home. In this matter the husband and wife were one in a sense they had scarcely ever been, but in the happy, cloudless days which now seemed to have belonged to a former existence, Jane Oglander had already become as much as a young girl can be to a married woman some years older than herself, Mrs. Maule's closest friend. With these two dear friends was joined in the same wordless sense of deep gratitude Dick Wantele, Richard Maule's cousin, and in this affair his spokesman and representative. It was this young man who, shaking himself free of a constitutional lethargy, had become the indispensable adviser and friend of both brother and sister; it was he who had persuaded Jack Oglander to plead "not guilty"; it was he who had gone to great personal trouble in order that Miss Oglander might be spared, as much as was possible, the dreadful publicity into which each such tragic happening brings innocent victims. During the weeks which elapsed between the arrest and the trial, Miss Oglander learnt to lean on Dick Wantele, to ask for, and defer to, his advice, far more than she was at the time aware. Wantele's tact and good feeling, and his intelligent withholding of the sympathy with which she was at that time nauseated, were almost uncannily clever considering the end he had in view. An offer of marriage very seldom takes a woman by surprise, but twice Jane Oglander was so surprised immediately after her brother's arrest. The very next day a man much older than herself--whom she had regarded with the kindly affection and indifference with which girls so often regard one whom they unconsciously consider as a contemporary of their parents rather than their own--had come and implored her to marry him there and then. He was a member of the administration then in office, and he had hinted that by doing this--that is, by marrying him--she would almost certainly benefit her brother's cause. But though she was touched, and touched to tears, by the strangely worded proposal, it formed but an incident, to herself an unimportant incident, in days crowded with such pain and amazing unhappiness.