For himself he wished fervently that Miriam had chosen any manner of self-immolation rather than this. He wished it had been as Shorty had said, that Mrs. Darrow had been the guilty party. With her it would have been sheer sinfulness inspired no doubt by cupidity equally as sheer. But one black mark more or less was insignificant in the dim total of Julia Darrow's score. As it was, Shorty must have been mistaken, or have lied to him. Altogether this, the more practical part of the affair, puzzled the Major greatly. In nowise could he make the boy's story coincide with Miriam's. She had related straightforwardly and simply how it had all come about. She had gone in search of Dicky, and had found him lying insensible on the floor--insensible she concluded from shock at seeing Mr. Barton dead, for she had realised in an instant that the old man had been murdered. In the desk beside him lay the will. At once she had recognised it, and with it her chance of saving Gerald. She had not stopped to think. Her instinct had impelled her. At all costs, to him, to her, to any one, she must save him. The whole thing had been a matter of two minutes--the result was one spreading alas, not merely over two years, but over a lifetime. He was obliged to confess that strictly speaking she had been, or, as he preferred to put it, her judgment had been wrong--very wrong. True to his word, he had lost no time in placing Gerald formally in possession of the Manor House, and Miriam of her income under the will. Then he had betaken himself and his wife back to Brampton where his regiment was stationed, and tried to throw himself with renewed energy into his profession. On his part Gerald's first visit had been to the tailor's, with the wondrous result already described. His presence now at the abode of Mrs. Darrow was due solely to that lady's very considerable proficiency in the arts of flattery, and to the young man's even more considerable susceptibility to them. For, as we know, he was supposed to hold no love for Mrs. Darrow. But she had seen her chance and had taken it. Immediately on hearing the momentous news, she had hurried back from Bournemouth, where she was staying, and had succeeded in being the first, not only to congratulate the new lord of the manor on his succession to his own, but to condole with him over his maltreatment in the past. And this had gone straight home with that young gentleman, who, truth to tell, was beginning to feel the need of a little moral support so far as his action in having left his wife was concerned. So seeing that from Mrs. Darrow he would be sure to get it, he had accepted with avidity her invitation to partake of tea at Pine Cottage. There he poured out to her his weak story while she poured out for him tea even weaker, with the result that both were comforted for the time, he being content to put up with the tea in return for the quieting of his already uneasy conscience.