"If you know my heart you must know that it is as guiltless of sin against you, and as true to my duty as a wife, as you, my husband, can desire. But you must know that, or you would not have brought Angus Hamleigh to this house." "Perhaps I wanted to try you--to watch you and him together--to see if the old fire was quite burnt out." "You could not be so base--so contemptible." "There is no knowing what a man may be when he is used as I have been by you--looked down upon from the height of a superior intellect, a loftier nature--told to keep his distance, as a piece of vulgar clay--hardly fit to exist beside that fine porcelain vase, his wife. Do you think it was a pleasant spectacle for me to see you and Angus Hamleigh sympathizing and twaddling about Browning's last poem--or sighing over a sonata of Beethoven's--I who was outside all that kind of thing?--a boor--a dolt--to whom your fine sentiments and your flummery were an unknown language. But I was only putting a case, just now. I liked Hamleigh well enough--in his way--and I asked him here because I thought it was giving a chance to the Vandeleur girls. That was my motive--and my only motive." "And he came--and he is dead," answered Christabel, in icy tones. "He went to that lonely place this morning--at your instigation--and he met his death there--no one knows how--no one ever will know." "At my instigation?--confound it, Christabel--you have no right to say such things. I told him it was a good place for woodcock--and it pleased his fancy to try his luck there before he left. Lonely place, be hanged. It is a place to which every tourist goes--it is as well known as the road to this house." "Yet he was lying there for hours and no one knew. If Nicholls had not gone he might be lying there still. He may have lain there wounded--his life-blood ebbing away--dying by inches--without help--without a creature to succour or comfort him. It was a cruel place--a place where no help could come." "Fortune of war," answered Leonard, with a careless shrug. "A sportsman must die where his shot finds him. There's many a day I might have fallen in the Rockies, and lain there for the lynxes and the polecats to pick my bones; and I have walked shoulder to shoulder with death on mountain passes, when every step on the crumbling track might send me sliding down to the bottomless pit below. As for poor Hamleigh; well, as you say yourself, he was a doomed man--a little sooner or later could not make much difference." "Perhaps not," said Christabel, gloomily, going slowly to the door; "but I want to know how he died." "Let us hope the coroner's inquest will make your mind easy on that point," retorted her husband as she left the room. CHAPTER II. "YOURS ON MONDAY, GOD'S TO-DAY."