“Oh, no, no, I can’t think you would be so hard, so cruel, so wicked!” cried poor Audrey, alarmed to see the look of stubborn determination in the viscount’s eyes. But she was wrong. Used all his life to having his own way, except in the matter of the behaviour of his headstrong and not very worthy sons, Lord Clanfield could make up his mind inflexibly, and carry out his plans with the dogged steadfastness of a not unjust or unkindly, but narrow mind. He believed that he might have been unjust to Gerard, that there was a possibility that the young man’s reiterated asseverations of his innocence might have something in them, after all. But the more inclined he was to believe this, the less likely was he to believe in the complete innocence and guilelessness of Gerard’s wife. It even occurred to him as possible that this beautiful woman, who had shown herself so frivolous if not worse, might have connived in some diabolical plot to get her husband out of the way. “I hope I am not wicked,” he said coldly. “And, indeed, I did not expect to hear that word applied to me. I have done my best, I am still doing my best, for my nephew, and I shall continue to do it if I am suffered to do it in the way I think right. However, the matter is in your hands, madam, and it is for you to decide what course we are both to pursue.” Audrey, who had refused all Lord Clanfield’s perfunctory invitations to be seated, was standing, just as she had been ever since her entrance, forlorn and desolate, in the middle of the floor. Her hands were tightly clenched, her eyes showed the terrible conflict which was going on within her. Must she give him up? Could she? Ought she? Would it really be best for him, as Lord Clanfield said? On the one hand were the care, the luxury, the atmosphere of a beautiful English home, the protection, the very powerful protection of an eminent name, the energetic endeavours of his relations to have the taint removed from his name. On the other hand, there was nothing but her own love, and such efforts as she, poor, weak, helpless woman that she was, could make on his behalf. And, while it was true that she felt certain he must be suffering deeply from her disappearance, and the suspense he must be in as to what had become of her, yet she did not disguise from herself the fact that the knowledge of the position in which she had so strangely got placed might give him even more pain and more anxiety than the suspense from which he was now suffering on her account. In the silence which followed the viscount’s words, a dead silence in which the slightest sound was audible to them both, there came a halting step outside the door of the room, and then a knock. Recognising the step, or guessing whose it was, Audrey raised her head, and uttered, in a hoarse whisper, the one word: “Gerard!”