"Then, sir, by token of that frankness, your Grace is a straight man," the Senator said, decidedly, and with an air that invested his words with greater weight than was perhaps due to their moral perspective. "And," he added in a lighter vein, "somehow, the honor of your house seems to have got inextricably mixed with that of mine." "That’s exactly the way I hoped you’d look at it," responded the Duke, earnestly. "I think you take my meaning. May I speak to Leonie?" "It’s what I should do in your place," was the Senator’s reply—a reply which had the effect of relaxing General Sadgrove’s ramrod-like attitude, and of causing that grim man-hunter to subside into his corner, with a not unkindly chuckle. ———— On a winter afternoon, six months afterwards, Alec Forsyth entered the firelit dining-room of the Prior’s Tarrant dower-house, which, as agent of the ducal estates, he had occupied since his marriage in September. The Duke and Duchess were away in Egypt on their honeymoon, and Forsyth had been doing the honors of a big shoot in the home coverts to a party of neighboring country gentlemen. Sybil, who had been sitting in a low chair by the hearth, rose and drew him to the blaze, first relieving him of his gun. "I won’t light the lamp yet, dear," she said. "I am forced to refer to the forbidden subject, and you may want to blush." "Forbidden subject?" said Forsyth, not for the moment comprehending. "Well, of course you haven’t taken to forbidding me anything yet; perhaps ’tacitly avoided’ would be a better phrase," the young wife replied, perching herself on the arm of her husband’s chair. "I refer to that poor creature whose one redeeming point was, as the dear General put it on that eventful night, an unselfish attachment to your noble self." Forsyth had never been able to bring himself to talk of the reason of his uncle’s confidence in his safety in the crypt that night, when he had lent himself to a ruse which he had believed meant death if he was recognized. He had loathed "Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s" obtrusive admiration long before he had entered the lists against her, and it was from a knowledge of his feelings that the General had abstained from informing him beforehand of the terrible Ziegler’s identity, guessing that his natural delicacy would have prevented him from turning to account a sentimental weakness so necessary to a successful issue, yet so revolting to his modesty. "Must you really refer to that wretched woman?" he asked, as soon as he saw Sybil’s meaning. "Only to tell you that she is dead," was the reply. "It is in the _Standard_, which came after you had left for the coverts. There, I must light the lamp, after all, so that you may read it yourself." When the lamp shone out on the pleasant, homelike room, this was the paragraph which Forsyth read: