All that afternoon Williams surveyed callers doubtfully from a side window before opening the door. Had Mr. Forde again appeared, he would have put up the chain, and parleyed with him like a beleaguered city to the opposing force. About six o'clock Lord Darsham came rattling up in a hansom. He had telegraphed back a reply to Dolly, and followed that reply as fast as an express train could bring him. She ran downstairs, thankful for his arrival, and after years, long, long years, the Vicar of Dassell's little girl and Charley Trebasson, Leonora's first lover, met again. "I should have known you anywhere," he said, after the first words of greeting and exclamations of pity and horror were uttered. "Am I so little changed?" she asked, with a forced smile. "Ah! you are so much changed," he answered; "you look so many years too old, you look so much too thin. What is the matter with you Mrs. Mortomley? I cannot bear to--" "Never mind me," she said almost brusquely; "Your business now is with Leonora; I ought not to have sent you that telegram, you must forget it." "Is Mr. Werner not dead then?" he asked. "Dead! yes, indeed he is poor fellow!" she answered; "but I acted on a fancy when I telegraphed that he committed suicide. He took chloroform to relieve the pain of neuralgia, and the chloroform killed him." Mrs. Werner's cousin looked Mrs. Mortomley steadily in the face while she uttered this sentence, then, when she paused and hesitated, he said, "You had better be perfectly frank with me. I remember, if you do not, how when you were a child, it was of no use your trying to tell a fib because your eyes betrayed you, and I must say to you now, as I often said to you then, speak the truth, for with that tell-tale face no one will believe you when you try to invent a likely falsehood." "To be perfectly straightforward then," answered Dolly; "when I sent that telegram to you I believed Mr. Werner had destroyed himself; when I arrived here, I found every one believed his death was due entirely to accident." "And may I inquire why you believed he had committed suicide?" "No," she replied; "that is my secret, and for very special reasons I want to have nothing to do with the matter--special reasons," she repeated; "not selfish, pray understand. I did not think of the inquest; I did not think of anything except that, on Leonora's account, you ought to be here, when I wrote that telegram, and--" "I know what you mean," he interrupted; seeing the subject affected her deeply, and he took a turn up and down the room before he spoke again. "What could have induced him to kill himself?" he said, at length stopping abruptly in his walk.