If I have been this man’s blind dupe, his helpless tool, she may have been as blind, as helpless as myself. O God, give me strength to trust her still, for my heart must break if she is base and cruel.” A man’s ideas are not apt to arrange themselves very consecutively at such a time; but it was something after this fashion that Francis Tredethlyn reflected upon his friend’s treachery, while Rosa stood by watching him very anxiously, with that fiery eagerness which had prompted her to speak her mind considerably cooled down by the aspect of her companion’s distress. “Miss Grunderson,” said Francis presently, “whatever the world may have said against Harcourt Lowther, it is a false and lying world if it ever slandered the goodness and purity of my wife.” “I know that,” answered Rosa, becoming energetic once more; “for of all the sweet darlings that ever were, she’s the sweetest and the dearest. And how should _she_ know that people made nasty disagreeable remarks about Mr. Lowther’s always happening to go to the parties she went to and calling here oftener than other people, and so on----” “He went to parties!” cried Francis. “He told me that he hated parties; that he scarcely went anywhere.” “Ah, but he did, though; and it has been his flirting way--not the things he has said, you know, but his way or saying them--his _ompressmong_, you know, that has caused those ill-natured remarks about Mrs. Tredethlyn. Nothing sets people talking like _ompressmong_.” Francis did not answer. Little by little the mists cleared away from his mental vision; and he saw that Harcourt Lowther had been from first to last the subtlest schemer who ever plotted the ruin of an honest blockhead. It had needed only Miss Grunderson’s feminine guesswork to let sudden light into the cavernous depths of the foulest pitfall that ever treachery dug under the ignorant footsteps of its victim. Francis remembered all the bitter ridicule, the sneering compassion, that Harcourt Lowther had heaped upon the respectable world, from which he held his dupe aloof, while he plunged him to the very lips in the dissipations of Bohemia. By this means he had effected as complete a separation between the husband and wife as if the same roof had ceased to shelter them. “I have thought--when my tempter gave me time to think--that it was Maude’s coldness alone which separated us; but I know now that it was the schemer’s work from first to last. She did not love me,--O Heaven, have pity upon my poor tortured heart!--she loved him, perhaps: but I might have had some little chance of winning her love if I had remained at her feet--her slave, her worshipper; but he has held me away from her, and now she abhors me. She has no feeling but disgust and disdain for the wretch who has abandoned her to waste his days on a racecourse, his nights in the drunken orgies of a gaming-house.”