No answer. Cheeks reddening, though. "Didn't he?"--persistently. "I will tell you what he told me of Clancy, Kate. Mrs. Clancy had utterly deceived you as to what he had to tell, had she not?" "Utterly." And now it was Mrs. Rayner's turn to color painfully. "Mr. Hayne tells me that Clancy's confession really explained how Captain Rayner was mistaken. It was not so much the captain's fault, after all." "So Mr. Hayne told him. You knew they--you saw Mr. Hayne offer him his hand, didn't you?" "I did not see: I knew he would." More vivid color, and much hesitation now. "_Knew_ he would! Why, Nellie, what do you mean? He didn't tell you that he was to see Captain Rayner. He couldn't have known." "But I knew, Kate; and I told him how the captain had suffered." "But how could you know that he would shake hands with him?" "He promised me." The silence was unbroken for a moment. Nellie Travers could hear the beating of her own heart as she nestled closer to her sister and stole a hand into hers. Mrs. Rayner was trying hard to be dutiful, stern, unbending, to keep _her_ faith with the distant lover in the East, whether Nell was true or no; but she had been so humbled, so changed, so shaken, by the events of the past few weeks, that she felt all her old spirit of guardianship ebbing away. "Must I give you up, Nell? and must he, too?--Mr. Van Antwerp?" "He has not answered my last letter, Kate. It is nearly a week since I have heard from him." "What did you write, Nellie?" "What I had done twice before,--that he ought to release me." "And--is Clancy's the only confession you have heard to-day?" "The only one." A pause: then, "I know what you mean, Kate; but he is not the man to--to offer his love to a girl he knows is pledged to another." "But if you were free, Nellie? Tell me." "I have no right to say, Kate; but"--and two big tears were welling up into her brave eyes, as she clasped her hands and stretched them yearningly before her--"shall I tell you what I think a girl would say if she were free and had won his love?" "What, Nellie?" "She would say, 'Ay.' No woman with a heart could leave a man who has borne so much and come through it all so bravely." Poor Mrs. Rayner! Humbled and chastened as she was, what refuge had she but tears, and then--prayer? XIX.