"Yes, I hope you found her satisfactory." Mr. Hubbard smiled somewhat grimly. "Indeed he did not," broke in Mrs. Hubbard speaking for him. "She broke confidence." "Broke confidence!" echoed Edith, in astonishment. "Melissa Blake?" "Yes," Hubbard returned. "I really didn't mean to tell you, but my wife, you see, has all the indignation of a woman against a woman." "But how did she break confidence?" demanded Edith. "I would trust her as implicitly as I would myself." "The papers she copied," was the reply, "were the plans for a syndicate to put up mills at Fentonville. We kept the scheme quiet until the route of the new railroad should be decided, and when we came before the Committee of the House, the whole thing had been given away, and the Wachusett men had even secured the chairman, Tom Greenfield. He lives in Fentonville himself, and we had counted him at least as sure." "That must have been the thing," placidly observed Miss Penwick to Rangely, "that Mr. Irons was talking to Mrs. Sampson about, the night we dined there to meet Miss Merrivale." Rangely glanced up in vexation, to see if Miss Mott were listening, and caught a gleam of mischievous intelligence from her eyes. "I don't remember it," he answered ambiguously. "But how do you know," persisted Edith, "that the information came from Miss Blake?" "Because Mr. Staggchase found out at Fentonville afterward that she came from there, and that a young man she is engaged to had just forfeited on a mortgage some of the meadows our company was to buy." "The evidence doesn't seem to me conclusive," remarked Fenton, "and simply as a matter of family unity I am bound to believe in my wife's _proteges_." Even the faint sense of humor which he felt at the situation could not prevent him from experiencing the sting of self-shame. Had it been an equal who was unjustly accused of a fault he had committed he would have felt less humiliated. To the degradation of having betrayed Hubbard, the addition of this last touch of having also unconsciously injured an inferior came to him like the exquisite irony of fate. He wondered in an abstract and dispassionate way whether the ghost of all his misdeeds were continually to rise before him. "Really," he said to himself with a smile that curled his lips "in that case I shall become a perfect Macbeth." And at that instant the ghost most dreadful of all rose at the feast like that of Banquo as Rangely said,-- "I knocked at your studio this morning but couldn't get in." There flashed through Fenton's mind all the possibilities of discovery and disaster that might lie behind this remark, and his one strong feeling was that it would be unsafe to venture on a definite statement; he took refuge in the vaguest of general remarks. "I am sorry not to have seen you," he said.