Mechanically, as a man in a dream, he put on his coat and hat and got into his dog-cart that was waiting at the door. Cristiane was right. Ismay Trelane was bad to the core. But the man could not see the road for the bitterness of his heart as he drove home through the dark. Cristiane, in spite of her fright at his anger, smiled, well pleased, as she went up-stairs to bed. She had really seen Marcus Wray kiss Ismay; she had only kept back that the girl’s subtle instinct, even in her sleep, had made her moan and turn away from him, so that he crept away lest she should awake. She was cunning enough not to tell Wray what she had seen, but the sudden enlightenment had made her furious. Was this girl to come here and take every man she saw? Were her own good looks, her fortune, as nothing compared with the strange beauty of the other? Not while Cristiane le Marchant could stop it. Loved, caressed, guided in her every footstep by her dead father, the girl was utterly spoiled. Without that firm and loving hand she steered her own bark wildly, caring nothing for others, so that her own vanity was satisfied. And Miles Cylmer that night had struck at the self-conceit that was her most vulnerable part. “He’s going to hate her now,” she thought, with gleeful conviction. “Then he’ll come back to me, and I’ll refuse him again. Oh, how I will refuse him! And I’ll keep Mr. Wray here and make Miles wild.” She sank to sleep in a blissful reverie of Ismay driven out, Miles sighing in vain, and she herself marrying a duke. She would wear white satin and look very proud and cold. It would be delightful. And that death had to-day only missed her by a hair’s breadth, and to-morrow might strike again, she never thought. Nor that the girl she had betrayed this very night was the only soul on earth who could save her. CHAPTER XXVII. TRUTH THAT LIED! It was all so black, so terribly obvious as he looked at it. Cylmer thought long that night, in a weary circle that led back to the same horror. The original of that photograph had been Mrs. Trelane, and if Abbotsford’s death lay at her door, Ismay had known it. That little cry of hers came back to him. “I never saw it before.” A lie and a foolish one, that looking back was damning. And Wray--she could deceive him for a brute like that? And then there rushed over him the awful thought of the disgrace to come; the wheels that he had set in motion that were even now out of his power to stop. Even in his disenchantment, with that raging pain at his heart that she was false who seemed so true, he was glad that that one clue, that one fatal bit of evidence, the blue-green beetle, was in her hands. The detectives would never see it again; Mrs. Trelane warned in time, would destroy it and the bracelet he was certain it had belonged to--and Ismay.