"False on the face of it!" said Rhoda, with spirit. "Geoffrey--Mr Trethick," she said quickly, "told me that he had been twice to see old Mrs Prawle this week, and begged me to go soon." The next indictment was that Geoffrey had become so intimate with Madge Mullion that old Mr Paul had ordered him to leave the house, and that he was going at once. This was Miss Pavey's news, and she added that Mr Trethick would have to leave the town unless Mr Penwynn took compassion upon him. "Of course, my dear," she had said, maliciously, as she blew her nose in a gentlemanly way as if it were a triumphant note of defiance, "after what we are hearing you have quite cast him off?" Rhoda looked at the speaker steadily, but made no reply. But of this charge? "Well," Rhoda argued, "Madge Mullion is pretty and attractive, and she would probably throw herself open to the attentions of such a man as Geoffrey Trethick. But, if this were true, would Geoffrey behave as he had behaved at An Morlock of late? He seemed to be the soul of honour, and his words always had the ring of truth in them. No: it was one of the Carnac petty scandals; Geoffrey Trethick was no trifler." There was another long, dreamy time after this, and there were moments when Rhoda felt angry with herself for thinking so much about the man who now came to lay bare his plans, to consult her, so it seemed, when he was asking counsel of her father. And all at once she seemed to awaken to the fact that, by some means, the life of Geoffrey Trethick had become interwoven strangely with her own--that his success was her success, his failures hers; and yet he had spoken no word, given her no look. He was different to any man that she had ever met, and he even annoyed her sometimes by his quiet assumption of authority as the stronger in thought. For he would ask her advice, and often enough show the fallacy of what she had said. Then she would think that they were becoming too intimate, and blame her father for encouraging the presence of this stranger; but Mr Penwynn seemed, after a life of immunity, to have taken the mine fever badly, and the thought of Geoffrey Trethick pretending to his daughter's hand never occurred to him. "No," thought Rhoda, "papa thinks of nothing now but this speculation; and why should he? Geoffrey Trethick has never behaved otherwise than as a visitor working in my father's interest;" and as she said this to herself, a curious feeling of pique arose, but only to be crushed at once. Finally, Rhoda Penwynn's verdict on Geoffrey Trethick was that he was a gentleman--a man of unstained honour, whom fate had placed in a town full of petty scandal. The next day Rhoda endorsed her verdict, and it was in this wise.