“Yes, I met him after his marriage. Oddly enough, I was with him a few minutes before he destroyed himself. There, Mr. de Talor, I will not detain you any longer. I thought that you could perhaps tell me something of the details of Mary’s marriage. The story has a fascination for me, its results upon my own life have been so far-reaching. I am sure that I am not at the bottom of it yet. Mary wrote to me when she was dying, and hinted at something that I cannot understand. There was somebody behind who arranged the matter, who assisted Jones’s suit. Well, well, I shall find it all out in time, and whoever it is will no doubt pay the price of his wickedness, like the others. Providence has strange ways, Mr. de Talor, but in the end it is a terrible avenger. What! are you going? Queer talk for a lawyer’s office, isn’t it?” Here Mr. de Talor rose, looking pale, and, merely nodding to Mr. Cardus, left the room. The lawyer watched him till the door had closed, and then suddenly his whole face changed. The white eyebrows drew close together, the delicate features worked, and in the soft eyes there shone a look of hate. He clenched his fists, and shook them towards the door. [Illustration: “He clenched his fists and shook them towards the door.”] “You liar, you hound!” he said aloud. “God grant that I may live long enough to do to you as I have done to them! One a suicide, and one a paralytic madman; you—you shall be a beggar, if it takes me twenty years to make you so. Yes, that will hit you hardest. O Mary! Mary! dead and dishonoured through you, you scoundrel! O my darling, shall I ever find you again?” And this strange man dropped his head upon the desk before him, and groaned. CHAPTER III. OLD DUM’S NESS When Mr. Cardus came half an hour or so later to take his place at the dinner-table—for in those days they dined in the middle of the day at Dum’s Ness—he was not in a good mood. The pool into which the records of our individual existence are ever gathering, and which we call our past, will not often bear much stirring, even when its waters are not bitter. Certainly Mr. Cardus’s would not. And yet that morning he had stirred it violently enough. In the long, oak-panelled room, used indifferently as a sitting and dining room, Mr. Cardus found “hard-riding Atterleigh” and his grand-daughter, little Dorothy Jones. The old man was already seated at table, and Dorothy was busying herself cutting bread, looking as composed and grown-up as though she had been four-and-twenty instead of fourteen. She was a strange child, with her assured air and woman’s ways and dress, her curious thoughtful face, and her large blue eyes that shone steadily as the light of a lamp. But just now the little face was more anxious than usual. “Reginald,” she began, as soon as he was in the room (for by Mr. Cardus’s wish she always called him by his Christian name), “I am sorry to tell you that there has been a sad disturbance.”