If she once found that her beauty would bring to her--and incidentally to him--diamonds, motors, life on the champagne standard, he literally could not conceive that she could hesitate. What was the good of having a girl like that in your power if you could not make her keep you? He was determined to have an old age of comfort, as a result of the earnings of Rona. He knew all the ropes. He knew all there was to know about the "Profession." He knew that, given material of the quality of that girl, success, with the right steps taken, the right course adopted, was quite certain. He sat smoking, and thinking it over, with his whisky on the table beside him. He considered what, or how much, he could or should tell Rona of what he suspected of her parentage. He was himself the son of a solicitor, and had received a good education. But there was a bad strain in the blood. Both he and his brother had gone to the bad, and his brother had died young, leaving an orphan girl, whose early associations were those of a life of discreditable shifts, but who had developed the backbone lacking in her father and uncle, had insisted upon qualifying to teach, and when her education was complete, had obtained a post as governess in the family of Mauleverer, a well-known old house of the Roman faith in the North of England. But it seemed as if this girl, too, were infected by the obliquity of the family morals, for, after a time, she disappeared from her uncle's view, his letters being returned to him marked "Gone away. Address unknown." One day he received a letter with a London postmark, written at her dictation. It said that she was married, that she had just become a mother, that she was dying. The letter, which bore no address, was only to be posted in case of her actual death, and then not until after a month had elapsed. She did not reveal the name of her husband, but said that her tiny daughter was to be brought up in a certain convent--the address of which she gave him--under the name of Leigh. She begged him to inquire from time to time of the child's health. Her uncle and she had never been in sympathy. Evidently she had nobody else at all to whom she could appeal for her baby's sake to take some interest in her. She had always been a good and very quiet, steady girl, yet her uncle found it a little hard to believe in the story of her marriage. There was a young man at Vane Abbey--John Mauleverer, the eldest son. But he was a shy, retiring, delicate youth, by no means the kind of man whom one suspects of making love to the governess. Rankin Leigh had made a few inquiries at the time, but had learnt nothing to confirm such a suspicion.