“Then it is all true!” she cried, triumphant. In perfect good faith and tender feeling Mary had made her comment upon this strange, sad revelation; yet she could not but feel all the same the triumph of having thus caught Geoff, and of establishing beyond all doubt that it was true. She fell a-crying in the happiness of the discovery. The moment it was certain, the solemnity of it blew aside, as do the mists before the wind. “Then he will come home again; he will have his poor little children, and all will be well,” she said; and cried as if her heart would break. It was vain for Geoff to tell her that nothing was as yet proved, that he did not know how to approach the subject; no difficulties troubled Mary. Her heart was delivered as of a load; and why should not everything at once be told? But she wept all the same, and Geoff had no clue to the meaning of her tears. She was glad beyond measure for John Musgrave; but yet while he was an exile, who had (secretly) stood up for him as she had done? But when he came home, what would Mary have to do with him? Nothing! She would never see him, though she had always taken an interest, and he would never know what interest she had taken. How glad she was! and yet how the tears poured down! Geoff had a long ride home. He was half alarmed that he had allowed so much to be known, but yet he had not revealed Lizabeth’s secret. Mary had required no particulars, no proof. The suggestion was enough for her. She was not judge or jury--but one to whom the slightest outlet from that dark maze meant full illumination. Geoff could not but speculate a little on the surface of the subject as he rode along through the soft evening, in that unbroken yet active solitude which makes a long ride or walk the most pleasant and sure moment for “thinking over.” Geoff’s thoughts were quite superficial, as his knowledge was. He wondered if John Musgrave had “taken an interest” in Mary as she had done in him; and how it was that Mary had been his brother’s betrothed, yet with so warm a sympathy for his brother’s supposed slayer? And how it was that John Musgrave, if he had responded at all to the “interest” she took in him, could have loved and married Lily? All this perplexed Geoff. He did not go any deeper; he did not think of the mingled feelings of the present moment, but only of the tangled web of the past.