But the memory of Dare's face as he had pleaded with her in the garden, the sympathy of the strong kindly voice, the earnest insistence of his manner when he spoke of his desire to be helpful, and his right as her sincere friend to the privilege of her confidence, awoke in her a craving for his help, for the comfort of his advice. She was conscious also of a wish for his presence; it would be an immense relief merely to talk with him. Quickly she resolved to make a further attempt to write to him, and searched in the desk for another sheet of paper. She opened the drawers, and turned over their contents,--bills principally, and old letters of Arnott's. From among a pile of loose papers a cablegram fell out, face upward, with a cutting from a newspaper pinned to the back of it. The writing caught Pamela's eye; the brief message on the little yellow form was fully exposed. "Lucy Arnott died this morning." And the cablegram was dated ten months ago. Pamela took it up and stared at the message with dull, comprehending eyes. Ten months earlier Arnott had received this news of his wife's death, and he had withheld the knowledge from her. Ten months ago he had it in his power to legalise their union, and he had not done it. He had wilfully deceived her in the matter of his wife's death. There was only one interpretation to put upon his conduct: he had no wish, no intention, to right the wrong he had done her. Pamela shivered, and laid the cablegram down on the desk and stared at it, faint and sick with the pain and anger, the shamed resentment with which this knowledge filled her. Arnott's infamous conduct showed her plainly how lightly he regarded her, how little of honour, of love or respect he felt for the girl he had cheated into marrying him, and had made the mother of his children. Free now to marry her, he was satisfied to keep her in the shameful position of a mistress, and to follow lightly after illicit loves. She recalled his words uttered on the last evening before he left home: "Cheap! Women are cheap." That probably had been his attitude always in regard to women. She turned back the cablegram and looked at the printed form attached to it. It was a cutting from an English newspaper containing a brief notice of Lucy Arnott's death. Why, she wondered, had he kept the thing lying about loose in his drawer where any one might read it? She took it up, closed the desk, forgetting Dare and her intention to write to him, forgetting everything in face of this horrible ugly proof of Herbert's treachery; and going up to her own room, she locked the cablegram away in the safe where she kept her jewels. CHAPTER TWENTY. Oddly enough the first news of Blanche Maitland came to Mrs Carruthers through Dare.