pity.” “A gentle heart, indeed,” I replied; “who would not hate the scoundrel who could wound it?” I was by no means satisfied with this conversation, and from that moment lowered my opinion of Mr. Vandeleur. He may have perceived the change in my feelings; in any case, he speedily announced his intention of travelling farther westward, thanked me for my friendly reception, and bade me good-bye. Only a few weeks after that I heard of Janet Davoren’s disappearance. You can imagine, perhaps, what I suffered, blaming my own blindness, my foolish neglect, as the primary cause of her ruin.’ ‘There is a fate in these things,’ said Geoffrey gloomily. ‘I called upon Mr. Davoren, hinted at my fears, and entreated him to be candid with me. But he evaded my questions with a proud reserve, which I could but admire, and kept the secret of his daughter’s disgrace, even though it was breaking his heart. Thus repulsed, what could I do? And the claims upon my time are so incessant. Life is such a whirligig, Mr. Hossack. If I had had more leisure for thinking, I should have been perfectly miserable about that poor girl.’ ‘You never obtained any clue to her fate?’ ‘No. Yet at one moment the thread seemed almost in my hand, had I been but in time to follow it. Three years after that fatal summer, a cousin of Sir Horatio’s, a young lieutenant in the navy, who had been with us at the time of Miss Davoren’s visit, came here for the shooting. “What do you think, Lady Baker?” he drawled out at dinner the first day in his stupid haw-haw manner, “I met that fellow Vandeleur last Christmas, at Milford, in Dorsetshire. I was down there to look up my old uncle Timberly—you remember old Timberly, Sir Horatio, the man from whom I’m supposed to have expectations; revolting old fellow, who has gout in his stomach twice a year and never seems any the worse for it. Well, Lady Baker, I found a fellow I knew down at Milford, an ensign in the regiment quartered there, and he was dooced civil, and asked me to dine with him on their guest night, and there, large as life, I beheld our friend Vandeleur. He seemed uncommonly popular in the mess, but he wasn’t overpleased to see me; and my friend Lucas told me afterwards that in his opinion the man was no better than an adventurer, and the colonel was a fool to encourage him. He was always winning everybody’s money, and never seemed to lose any of his own; altogether there was something queer about him. There was an uncommonly pretty woman with him—his wife, I suppose—but she never went anywhere, or visited anybody, and she looked very unhappy, Lucas told me. I came back to London next day, and I had a letter from Lucas a week afterwards to say that there’d been an awful burst-up at Milford; that Vandeleur had been caught in the act of cheating at whist—the stakes high, and so on—and had been morally, if not physically, kicked out of the mess-room; after which he had bolted, leaving the poor little wife and no end of debts