“She was always full of fancies. Yes, I remember she used to say the house was haunted by the ghosts of the Strangways. I really think she had a dim idea that I had injured that spendthrift race in buying the estate which they had wasted. And so to satisfy Juanita you took the trouble to ferret out Miss Newton? Upon my word, Theodore, your conduct is more Quixotic than I could have believed of any young man in the nineteenth century. And pray by what means did you discover the _ci-devant_ governess?” Theodore told the story of his visit to the scholastic agencies, his journey to Westmorland, and his friendly reception by Miss Newton in her Lambeth lodgings. “She was much attached to Miss Strangway, who was her first charge, and near enough to her own age to be more of a companion than a pupil,” he said, “and she spoke of her melancholy fate with great tenderness.” “It was a melancholy fate, was it? I know she made a runaway-marriage; but in what way was her fate sadder than the common destiny of a spendthrift’s daughter—a girl who has been reared in extravagance and self-indulgence, and who finds herself face to face with penury in the bloom of her womanhood?” “That in itself would be sad, but Miss Strangway’s destiny was sadder than that—commonplace enough, no doubt—only the old story of an unhappy marriage and a runaway wife.” He could not help looking at Lord Cheriton at this point, thinking how this common story of an unfaithful wife must needs remind his kinsman of that other story of another wife which had influenced his early manhood. He must surely have a sensitive shrinking from the discussion of any similar story. “She ran away from her husband! Yes, I remember having heard as much. What did Miss Newton know about her—beyond that one fact?” “Very little—only that she died at Boulogne nearly twenty years ago. This fact Miss Newton heard from the lips of the man for whom Mrs. Darcy left her husband. I had been at Boulogne a week or so before I saw Miss Newton, and I had hunted there for any record of Mrs. Darcy’s death, without result. But this is not very strange, as it is quite likely that she lived at Boulogne under an assumed name, and was buried in that name, and so lies there, in a foreign land, dissevered for ever from any association with her name and kindred.” “There are not many of her kindred left, I take it,” said Lord Cheriton. “There seems to have been a blight upon that race for the last half-century. But, now, tell me about some one in whom I am more interested—the girl you believe to be Mercy Porter. I should be very glad to make her life happier, and so I told her ladyship. You, Theodore, might be the intermediary. I would allow her a hundred a year, which would enable her to live in some pretty country place—in Devonshire or Cornwall, for instance, in some quiet sea-coast village where no one would know anything about her or her story.” “A hundred a year! My dear Cheriton, that is a most generous offer.”