This was discouraging, but the mother still cherished her dream; cherished it until the bitter hour of awakening—that fatal hour in which she learned from a letter in the girl’s own hand that Janet had abandoned home, friends, reputation—the very hope of heaven, as it seemed to the heartbroken father and mother—to follow the fortunes of a villain, of whose identity they had not the faintest idea, whose opportunities for the compassing of this deadly work would seem to have been of the smallest. The girl’s letter—passionate, despairing, with a wild and deep despair which told how desperate had been the conflict between love and duty—gave no hint of her betrayer’s name or place in the world. The letter was somewhat vaguely worded. There are some things which no woman could write. Janet Davoren did not tell them that she went of her own free will to perdition. But so much despair could hardly accompany an innocent passion; sorrow so deep and hopeless implied guilt. To the Rector and his wife there seemed no room for doubt. They read and re-read the long wild appeal for forgiveness or oblivion; that their only daughter, the pride and idol of both, might be pardoned or forgotten. They weighed every word, written with a swift impetuous hand, blotted by remorseful tears, but no ray of hope shone between the lines. They could arrive at but one miserable conclusion. The girl had accepted dishonour as the cost of a love she was too weak to renounce. The letter was long, wild, recklessly worded; but in all there was no clue to the traitor. The Rector and his wife made no outcry. They were even heroic enough to suppress all outward token of their grief, lest their little world should discover the cruel truth. The father went about his daily work pale and shaken, but calm of aspect. The only noticeable fact in his life was that from this day forth he neglected his garden and his poultry-yard. His innocent delight in Dorking fowls and standard rose-trees perished for ever with his daughter’s disappearance. The mother wept in secret, and suffered not so much as a single tear to be seen by her household. The servants were told that Miss Davoren had gone upon a visit to some friends in London. Janet had left the house in the early morning, unseen by any one except the lad who attended to the garden, and him she had employed to convey a small portmanteau to the railway station. The manner of her departure therefore had been commonplace enough; but the servants were accustomed to hear a good deal of preliminary discussion before any movement of the family, and wondered not a little that there should have been nothing said about Miss Davoren’s departure beforehand, and that she should have gone away so early, before any one was up, and without so much as a cup of tea, as the cook remarked plaintively.