“The daughter had troubled us very little. Evelyn was not an exacting mother. The child’s existence was a burden to her—rendered hateful by the stigma upon her birth, which the mother could not forget. Mercy’s infancy was spent in a Buckinghamshire village, in the cottage of her foster-mother. Mother and daughter never lived under the same roof till they came here together, when Mercy was seven years old.” “Yet, according to village tradition, Mrs. Porter was passionately fond of her daughter, and broken-hearted at her loss.” “Village tradition often lies. I do not believe that Evelyn ever loved her child. She bitterly felt the circumstances of her birth—she bitterly resented her unhappy fate; but I believe it was her pride, her deep sense of wrong done to herself, which tortured her rather than her love for her only child. She is a strange woman, Theodore—a woman who could do that deed—a woman who could write that letter. Your friend has fathomed her unhappy secret. She was a mad woman when she fired that shot. She was mad when she penned that letter. And now, Theodore, I have trusted you as I have never before trusted mortal man. I have ripped open an old wound. You know all, and you see what lies before me. I have to find that woman and to save her from the consequences of her crime, and to save my daughter and my grandson from the hazards of a mad woman’s malignity. You can help me, Theodore, if you can keep a cool, clear brain, and do just what I ask you to do, and no more.” He put aside his emotion with one stupendous effort, and became a man of iron, cool, resolute, unflinching. “I will obey you implicitly,” said Theodore. He had been completely won by his kinsman’s candour. Had James Dalbrook told him anything less than the truth he would have despised him. As it was, he felt that he could still respect him, in spite of that fatal error, which had brought such deadly retribution. “It is early yet,” said Lord Cheriton, looking at his watch, and from that to the neat little clock on the mantelpiece, where the hands pointed to twenty minutes past nine. “The dog-cart is waiting outside. Do you drive to the Priory and put yourself on guard there till—till that unhappy woman has been traced. You can tell Juanita that I have sent you there—that I have heard of dangerous characters being about, and that I am afraid of her being in the house with only servants. My wife shall follow you later, and can stay at the Priory while I am away from home, which I must be, perhaps, for some time. I have to find her, Theodore.” “Have you any idea where she may be gone?” “For the moment, none. She may have made her way to the nearest river and thrown herself in. Living or dead, I have to find her. That is my business. And when I have found her I have to get her put away out of the reach of the law. _That_ is my business.”