The "we" sounded sweetly in the young man's ears, but its injustice was too appalling to be passed over. He felt compelled to defence. For a moment he thought of telling the whole truth, but he reflected that Philip had a tongue as well as he, and that no one had a right to make free with another man's confidence. Consequently his palliation only referred to the culprit's well-known inflexibility and almost morbid sense of duty; all of which made Belle more and more angry, as if the very insistence on such virtues involved some depreciation of their quality in the dead man. "I do not care what happens now," she said vehemently. "I know well enough that nothing he can say will harm father's good name; but I will never forgive him, never! It is no use excusing him; all you say only makes it more unnecessary, and cruel, and,--and stupid. I will never forgive him; no, never!" And all that night she lay awake working herself into a fever, mental and bodily, by piling up the many evidences in favour of her theory as to Philip's long-cherished enmity. He had never called, never spoken to them when all the world beside had been friendly. His very kindness to Dick was tainted; for had he not sided with the boy against her father? Once the train of thought started, it was easy to turn the points so that there seemed no possibility of its following any other line than the one she laid down for it as she went along. Finally, to clinch the matter, memory served her a sorry trick by suddenly recalling to her recollection Philip Marsden's gloomy face when she had told him who she was on their first meeting at the railway-station. She sat up in bed with little hot hands stretched into the darkness. "O father! father! I was the only one who loved you,--the only one!" A climax at once of sorrow and consolation which somehow soothed her to sleep.