"Yes," she answered, with a slight sigh, "I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella's lover--the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion." "But why--why did she consent to do this?" I asked. "She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella." "Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!" I cried. "Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin." "Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition," I declared savagely. "I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you meet him?" "Yes. He was at Porchester Terrace on the afternoon when I called," she replied. "A short, stout, black-whiskered man, of a decidedly Hebrew cast. He was dressed loudly and wore a white waistcoat with heavy gold albert--a typical City man such as one sees in Cornhill or Lothbury." "She showed no sign of affection towards him?" "None whatever. He was introduced to me by Mr Murray as Ella's affianced husband, and I was, of course, amazed that she should entertain a spark of affection for him. But half an hour later, when we were alone, she confessed in tears everything to me, just as I have related it to you." "Well, you utterly astound me," was all I could exclaim. What she had revealed to me placed my little Ella in an entirely new light. I never dreamed of her self-martyrdom. I sighed heavily, and a big lump arose in my throat as I reflected that, perhaps, after all death was preferable to life with a man whom she could not love. The calm twilight was deepening into night, and the silence was broken only by the low murmuring of the water, the swift swish of some rat or water-hen in the rushes startled at our presence, and the dismal cry of a night-bird in the willows on the opposite bank. "Did you hear nothing more of Ella after that day at Porchester Terrace--that 12th of November that was, alas! fatal to my happiness?"