Gerald shrugged his shoulders. "Of course, I have been extremely careful to keep off the subject with her," he said. "There is one thing, however, which makes me horribly suspicious that you may be right--that he is being actually unkind to her. I mean this. She seems to believe that, when she leaves here, it is final. Now and then, when she is off her guard, she seems to assume that she will never see any of us again. I did what amounted to some pretty open fishing for an invitation to Omberleigh the other day. She was wholly unresponsive." "She did admit to me, in one letter, that she did very wrong to marry him," slowly said Mrs. Mynors. "She did?" he cried quickly. "She practically admitted that her marriage was a failure as far as she was concerned. I will show you that bit of the letter, though most of it is private. I have it here." Upon his eager assent she produced that letter from Virginia, which Gaunt had intercepted, and read a paragraph to him: _... What I have done is wrong. I know that now. I half knew it all the time. But what else was there for me to do? I believe God knows I did it for the best. I was at the end of my own strength; I was at the end of all our money. I had you all dependent upon me, and I knew I was going to break down._ _I felt I had to save you, and, Oh, mother, you can't, you simply must not deny that I have done that!..._ Mrs. Mynors glanced at the young man's face. It was set and hard. "You should have shown me that before. I think it conclusive," said he. "Only a most unhappy woman could have written so." He broke off with a catch in his breath. "And to think that I had failed her, that she was in those desperate straits and I never knew! Oh, ye gods, how blind we are! But you see, don't you, that the fact of my deserting her then makes it more incumbent upon me to save her now, if I can? Mad or sane, there can be no doubt that the brute must be desperately jealous. We only want suspicious circumstances and somebody who will be sure to mention them to him. If I mistake not, Mr. Ferris is the very man for our purpose. The fact that he himself admires Virgie to the point of fatuity will give the necessary edge to his malice." "Have you heard from him? He is coming to-day?" "Yes, that's all right," replied Gerald hastily. "No more now; I hear her on the stairs." Virginia came in. Happiness and returning health together had made her radiant. She wore to-day a pale mauve frock, and a hat trimmed with a garland of mauve and faint blue flowers. Like Mr. Bent on another occasion, Gerald found himself distracted with the wonder as to which of the two colours matched her eyes. "What a day!" she said. "Oh, what a heavenly blue day, isn't it? Have you come to breakfast, Gerald? How nice!"