Is there any need for me to be more explicit, or to enter into details which could not fail of being painful to us both? No, I am sure there is not. Your woman's instinct will have already revealed to you the nature of the mistake in question. This I may add, that when I last parted from you I had no faintest prevision of what was so soon to happen. Perhaps it never would have happened had circumstances not called me away from Combe Fenton. Yet who shall say it is not best for the happiness of both that the discovery should have been made before the time had gone by for remedying it! That is the light in which I trust you will endeavor to regard it. In conclusion, my dear Miss Drelincourt, I can only ask you to believe in the sincerity of my contrition should my conduct be the cause of any temporary unhappiness to you. And that, in any case, it will be no more than temporary is the heartfelt hope of him who now subscribes himself Your obedient and devoted servant, Guy Ormsby. When the foregoing had been written, it was sealed up, addressed in full to "Miss Drelincourt, Rosemount, near Combe Fenton, Devon," and taken charge of by Mrs. Jenwyn. All that now remained to be done was to arrange for the handing over of the hundred pounds, and then for Mrs. Jenwyn to take her departure. CHAPTER VII. AN AMAZING CONFESSION. Within a month of the events recorded in the preceding chapter, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge had left Combe Fenton. Anna had conceived a violent dislike to the place, and was restless till she got away from it. After her receipt of Guy Ormsby's letter, which Mrs. Jenwyn had arranged to have mailed from London, she never set foot on the sands of Carthew Bay. It is almost needless to state that the girl Fanny was left behind. She had heard of John Clisby's visit to Rosemount, and she needed no one to tell her why Mrs. Jenwyn had chosen to dispense with her services. A few days before Anna's departure she received the news of her half brother's marriage. The ceremony had been solemnized at the British embassy at Naples, the bride being a Miss Madeline Fenwicke, whose name Anna seemed to remember as that of a visitor at Denham Lodge some three years previously. In the course of the next four years, at the end of which period we take up their history afresh, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge found a temporary home in three or four widely different places. Anna's coming of age, and with it her command of the fortune left her by her father, had made no difference in her simple and inexpensive mode of life. She had had more than enough before for all her needs, and except that she now set aside a considerably larger sum for charitable purposes, the major portion of her income was never drawn upon, but allowed to accumulate untouched in her banker's coffers. Anna and her brother had met but once since the latter's marriage, and then he brought with him the news of the birth of a daughter.