A cold and formal invitation was therefore accorded to Miss Berlin as Mrs. Leslie's friend. Irene, burning with resentment and wounded pride, would fain have declined and gone out into the cold, strange world to seek her bread among strangers, but Mrs. Leslie's gentle solicitation prevailed, and she accepted the grudging invitation as reluctantly as it had been given. We will leave her there, in "the land of the orange, the myrtle and vine," and return to Guy Kenmore. CHAPTER XXI. Mr. Kenmore, in his pursuit of knowledge, had no difficulty in tracing the Stuarts in Richmond. At the elegant and fashionable West End of the city, a stylish residence was pointed out to him as the home of Clarence Stuart and his family. He remained in the city a few days and stored his mind with all the available facts regarding this, to him, interesting family. It was easy to do. The Stuarts, as wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic people, were well known. The city papers had duly announced their departure for Italy in their own yacht, the _Sea-Bird_. Their movements were considered generally interesting to the public, to judge by the paragraphs that appeared in the daily journals. Mr. Kenmore heard, incidentally, that Clarence Stuart's wife had been a wealthy heiress when he married her, some fifteen years before. Casual inquiry elicited the fact that Clarence Stuart's father had been dead three weeks. Guy Kenmore was startled by this information. It went far towards confirming his theory of the fragment of letter found in old Ronald Brooke's dead hand, and which he treasured carefully in his pocket-book. "It was the senior Stuart's death-bed confession," he said to himself. "What could that dying man have to confess to old Ronald Brooke?" What but the story of a crime that lay so heavy on his dying hours, that he was fain to seek the pardon of God and of man before he dared go out into the terrible unknown? _Who_ had dared to wrest that important confession from Mr. Brooke's hand, and strike him dead with the secret unrevealed? Shuddering, Guy Kenmore asked himself this question to which the answer seemed only too clear. The only persons who could have been vitally interested in old Clarence Stuart's death-bed confession were his son and his family. Was Clarence Stuart, junior, a guilty man or a wronged man? Did he or did he not know of his father's death-bed confession? By whose hand had that confession been sent to old Ronald Brooke? Who had followed behind the messenger and torn that document from the old man's hand with a death-blow? These questions rung unceasingly through Guy Kenmore's head. They sickened him with their terrible suggestions of hidden guilt and crime. He believed more and more that Ronald Brooke had been murdered instead of dying a natural death as his physicians had asserted. But how was he to find the murderer, and how bring his guilt home to him?