Tom Blake was thunderstruck. They were both standing facing one another a few feet apart. Blake was not a man to be disturbed by a trifle. He had been a good deal about in the world, and had had experience of various kinds of men and women. Many years ago he had met this woman frequently, and in the end he made love to her. Although she accepted that love and returned it, she had never taken him fully into her confidence. In Marion Butler, as he knew her eleven or twelve years ago, there had always been a certain undefined reserve. She would not refuse to answer any question put to her, nor was there a doubt she answered truly and fully. But she always created the impression that there were questions which he could not devise or discover, and the answer to which he was in no way prepared for. He had no idea or hint of what these questions might be. He was in no way uneasy about them. He was convinced there were portions of her nature which would always be concealed from him; but he was not jealous or suspicious. He was not then even slightly disquieted by this blankness, this reticence. It had no more meaning for him than would her native tongue, had she been born a Hindoo and laid that language aside for English. She had told him she had never loved any one but him, and he believed her without the possibility of doubt. She promised to be his wife, and he believed she would have stood at the altar with him though death were his rival for the first kiss. But now he was amazed, confounded. He had never seen the man Fahey, but he had heard and read in the papers a little about him, and from all he had gathered he fancied Fahey was a kind of upper servant or hanger-on of some kind. Davenport had spoken to him of Fahey, but the talk had been very general and vague, except with regard to the conspiracy, and the former man always showed the greatest possible disinclination to hear anything, or be asked any questions relating to the latter. Blake had never run the risk of riding a free horse to death. He got money in large sums from Mr. Davenport, but he had been judicious. There was nothing so low or coarse as blackmail hinted at by Mr. Davenport. That gentleman and he were excellent friends, and he had had bad luck, or was in want of money for some other cause, and when men became alarmed about money matters, although they were quite innocent, they often did foolish things. Look at that idiot Fahey. So Mr. Davenport, because he was a gentleman and a friend of Blake's, gave him money out of mere courtesy and good nature, and not fear, as one gives to a strange fellow-pedestrian on the footway when the stranger carries a load. There was no more hint of threat or dread of fear in the case of Mr. Davenport's offering the money, or of Blake taking it, than in the case of the meeting of two unacquainted wayfarers.