Out of the linen-lined envelope there fell many letters in her own writing, and the counterfoils of many checks made out to her own name and signed “W. M.,” and many others marked, “Drawn self, passed to Lady K.”; there were also bills signed by Cocky. Then she understood. The daughter of William Massarene knew all, or at least knew much, and must guess what she did not know. She turned cold with fear; the whirling water made her giddy; she gasped for breath and clutched the stem of a young rowan-tree. She, who had but scanty belief in generosity, wondered how many signatures of hers might not have been kept back by the sender? Of all these things of the past she had, herself, but the most confused recollection. In the early time, when Billy had been as Pactolus to her insatiable thirst, she had never kept any account of all she drew from him directly or indirectly. But whether all which compromised her were restored or not, the main fact remained the same: his daughter must _know_. And the signatures concerning the diamonds--where were they? Katherine Massarene might or might not have restored all the rest; but she had not sent her those. Where were they? Those which mattered most of all? It was mere mockery of her fears to send her back all these others and withhold from her the proofs of the transaction with Beaumont. It was cruelty, odious, tantalizing, cat-like cruelty, playing with her only to humiliate and degrade her more! “I always tried to be pleasant with her, and she never would respond,” she thought, with that sense of never being the least in fault herself, which so happily consoled and sustained her at all times. She heard steps approaching and she tore with frantic haste in little bits all her own letters and receipts and Massarene’s counterfoils, and flung them with the black-sealed envelope into the boiling stream, which eddying amongst its rocks swallowed them under spray and foam. The trout leaped up alarmed from the upper water, the field-fares and redwings flew up frightened from the cloud-berry bushes. The camp-ponies tethered near whinnied nervously. “What a destruction of correspondence!” said the voice of Sir Henry. “What have the writers done to you, Duchess?” With that marvellous power of self-command which the habit of the world teaches, she turned to him and laughed a little. “All advertisements!--and six sheets from Fraulein Heyse about the children. Such a disappointment, the envelope looked so imposing.” “For a clever liar at a pinch commend me to Cocky’s widow,” he thought. When, a few days later, the whole party, warned by a snowstorm, rode down the mountains and through the meadows to Bergen to rejoin Sir Henry’s schooner, which was in harbor there, she, who was the gayest and noisiest amongst them, thought of nothing but of those two missing signatures.