"What do you say to that?" he asked. "By Jove, I knew Mrs. T---- was straight," answered the Captain, in his unsophisticated phraseology. "But it was a shabby trick to play you all the same. I daresay Mop and Dop were in it. Those girls are always ready for larks." Leonard muttered something the reverse of polite about Dop and Mop, and went straight to the stable-yard, where he cancelled his order for the trap which was to have conveyed him to Trebarwith sands, and where he heard of the Baron's departure for Launceston. Mystified and angry, he went straight upstairs to his wife's room. All barriers were broken down now. All reticence was at an end. Plainest words, straightest measures, befitted the present state of things. Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed--a recess which held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie-dieu chair. A beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on china at Munich, gave beauty and sanctity to this little oratory. She was kneeling on the prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple velvet cushion, her head leaning forward on the folded arms, in an attitude of prostration and self-abandonment, her hair falling loosely over her white dressing gown. She rose at Leonard's entrance, and confronted him, a ghostlike figure, deadly pale. "Your lover has given me the slip," he said, roughly; "why didn't you go with him? You mean to go, I have no doubt. You have both made your plans to that end--but you want to sneak away--to get clear of this country, perhaps, before people have found out what you are. Women of your stamp don't mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the row." "You are mistaken," his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by his anger, as she had ever been untouched by his love. "The man who left here this morning was never my lover--never could have been, had he and I lived under the same roof for years. But I intended him for the avenger of that one man whom I did love, with all my heart and soul--the man you killed." "What do you mean?" faltered Leonard, with a dull grey shade creeping over his face. It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was suspected by his wife--but this straight, sudden avowal of the fact was not the less a shock to him.