"It's not in the least a fairy tale, my dear Lester. I know it because this estimable gentleman was himself in Elizabeth yesterday. The letter which Miss Lawrence received appointed a rendezvous at the Kingdon cottage. It was here she fled to see him--to buy him off, as she had done once before." CHAPTER XVI The Secret of the Cellar It was a moment before I fully understood the meaning of these extraordinary words. When I did understand them, I saw crumbling before me that elaborate structure which I had been at such pains to build--the structure founded upon the assumption of Miss Lawrence's innocence. She was only an adventuress, after all, then; or, more probably, only a weak woman, swayed by an ungovernable passion, risking everything rather than give up the man she loved; deceiving him, lying to him, taking the one desperate chance that lay within her reach; pausing at nothing so she might gain her end. Or perhaps she had really believed that old mistake of hers buried past resurrection. She may have thought him dead, this fascinating scoundrel who had turned her girlish head. She may have thought herself free. But even then her skirts were not wholly clean. She should have told her lover; she should never have permitted this shadow to lie between them--this skeleton, ready at any moment to burst from its closet. But better far that it should burst out when it did, than wait until the sin was consummated; an hour later, and the shackles had been forged past breaking! If revenge on Marcia Lawrence was the object of the plot, the conspirators had overleaped themselves. They should have waited until the words were uttered which bound her to her second lover--then, had they sprung their trap, how they might have racked her! One other thing I understood--and marvelled that I had not understood before. I saw what Mrs. Lawrence had meant by saying that the marriage was not impossible--that the obstacle could be cleared away--that it should be for Burr Curtiss to decide. But even he, I felt, would hesitate to take for his wife a woman just emerging from the shadow of the divorce court, however little she had been to blame for the tragedy which drove her there--more especially since he must see that from the very first she had not dealt fairly with him. A fault confessed may be forgiven; a fault discovered is a different thing. She had not been brave enough to confess; she had not trusted him; she had deceived him. She had been guilty, guilty! Those were the words which sang and sang in my brain and would not be stilled. Her face was a siren's face--beautiful, innocent, virgin-fresh; and her soul a siren's soul--merciless, selfish, hard. And I had fancied that the soul was like the face! I had not thought that a face like that could lie! Verily, of women I had much to learn!