The ways of civilization are not as the ways of the desert. There are men and women whose animosity is not to be appeased by kindness--who will take all they can get from a man, and go on detesting him cordially to the end. Edward Clare, the sleek, white-handed poet, possessed this constancy in hatred. John Treverton had done him no direct injury; for the poet’s love for Laura had never been strong enough to outweigh prudence. He had wanted Laura and Hazlehurst Manor: not Laura with her modest income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. He was angry with fate and Jasper Treverton for the will which had made Laura’s wealth dependent on her marriage with the heir; he hated John Treverton for the good fortune which had fallen into his lap. And this hatred wore such a noble aspect in the man’s own mind. It was no base envy of another’s prosperity; it was not even jealous anger against a rival, Edward told himself. No, it was a chivalrous ardour in the defence of the woman he had loved; it was a generous desire to serve her which urged him to pluck the mask from this smooth hypocrite’s face. If this man was indeed, as Edward believed, the husband of Zaïre Chicot, the dancer, then his marriage with Laura was no marriage, and the conditions of the will had not been fulfilled. The estate, the possession of which could only be secured by a legal marriage within the year following Jasper Treverton’s death, had been obtained by an audacious fraud. Was this great wrong to pass undetected and unpunished? Was Laura, whose love had been so easily won by this scoundrel, to go on blindly trusting him, until some day an accident should reveal his infamy and her dishonour? No, Edward believed that it was his duty to let in the light upon this iniquitous secret; and he determined to leave no stone unturned in the fulfilment of his mission. This fellow Desrolles was evidently a creature of John Treverton’s. His denial of the identity between the two men went for nothing in Edward’s mind. There must be plenty of people in the neighbourhood of Cibber Street able to identify the missing Chicot, if they could only be brought face to face with him. ‘I wonder you and Mrs. Treverton have not been photographed since your marriage,’ Edward said one afternoon in the Christmas week, when John Treverton was well enough to join the kettledrum party in the book-room, and they four, Mr. and Mrs. Treverton, Celia, and Edward, were sitting round a glorious fire. He had been looking over a volume of photographs by the light of the blazing wood, so the question seemed natural enough. ‘Ah, by-the-by, Jack, I really must have you photographed,’ said Laura gaily. ‘Lady Barker was very particular in her request for our photographs the other day. She has a very fine collection, she tells me.’