And then fancying that he had escaped from her, and being led to commit those frauds for which he was afterwards sentenced to imprisonment, was not his wooing of Priscilla just what might be looked for from such an unprincipled man? He had an idea, no doubt, that he would be able to squeeze a fortune out of her father, and when he had made his position secure, he would have cleared off, perhaps leaving Priscilla a message that he was not her husband. They had no trouble whatever in piecing together such a story of fraud as was adapted, they felt sure, to the fraudulent tendencies of the man and the ill-balanced passions of the woman on the other side of the Atlantic--Priscilla could see her quite clearly--a tall, darkhaired and dark-skinned creature--a termagant--the sort of woman that a sort of man would love fiercely and desert with joy when the dust of the ashes of his passion began to make his eyes smart and to irritate his nostrils. And as she pictured her, this woman was not the one to let a man wrong her and remain unpunished. She would not be such a fool as to allow a man to approach her unless he meant marriage; and she would certainly be able to hold him captive until he was ready to marry her. But while Priscilla believed what she wanted to believe--namely, that the man and the woman had been husband and wife before he had left her, she would have been sorry to allow herself to be so carried away by that impression as to believe that Marcus Blaydon might not have behaved to that woman as the scoundrel he had shown himself to be in regard to herself. She would have been sorry to think that he was not capable of deceiving his Lucy and running away from her; and being so obsessed by the certainty that the man was a villain, she could not feel so sure as she would have liked that he had actually married the woman who had been writing to him. She and Jack agreed, however, that Major Crosbie, a man who had been associated with greater villains, and a greater number of them, than almost any living man, certainly believed that Blaydon and that woman were man and wife, and against the belief of a man so well qualified to judge, the impressions of ordinary people not moving in criminal circles must be held of small account. And Priscilla, feeling this, was quite satisfied to allow her belief in the persistent villainy of Marcus Blaydon to yield to such _force majeure_.