"She wrote to me twice. One letter I received in Rome a month afterwards, and the second followed me about some weeks, and at last found me at Lindau, on the Lake of Constance. Both letters were full of her own unhappiness. In the first she reproached herself bitterly for having lied to the man she really loved--though she never mentioned your name--and said that she was back at Wichenford, but for her the world was dead. The man whom she had dismissed had left her in disgust and despair and had gone abroad, whither she knew not. A friend of yours had, it seemed, told her that you had gone to Algeria, and her letter concluded with the words: `I am alone to blame for this, yet how could I, in the circumstances, have acted otherwise?'" "And the second letter?" I asked eagerly. "It was written a month later, from Blumenthal's shooting-box near Blair Athol. She and her father were guests there at the great house-party consisting mostly of wealthy City men and their wives. She described it and said how she hated it all. She had, she told me, tried to escape. She had even thought of writing to you to tell you the truth and ask your counsel, yet what use was it when she knew that she must save her father from the ruin that threatened. Wichenford Place had been the home of the Murrays ever since the days of James the First, when the King himself, granted it to his faithful partisan, Donald Murray of Parton, in Dumfriesshire. No Murray had ever before mortgaged it, therefore it was clearly her duty to her family to redeem it from the hands of usurers and vandals, even at cost of her own happiness." "A noble sacrifice!" I sighed. "Yes, Mr Leaf. She was a noble girl," declared my handsome companion. "I, who knew her through ten years or so, knew her, perhaps, better than even you yourself did. The Little Madonna was never accused of an unkind or unjust action." "And after that letter?" "A few months later she came to visit us at Enghien. She and her father were in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau. But she made no mention of Blumenthal. Afterwards we were continually moving from place to place, and if she wrote, her letter never reached me. I heard no more." A long deep silence fell between us. We were still standing there in the grey twilight at a small gate that led into the next field, our path still continuing beside the stream. "Strange that it should be I who should tell you the truth," she remarked, almost as though speaking to herself. "You, a perfect stranger, offered to do me a service--indeed you have done me a very great service by restoring that letter to me--and in return, I have been able to tell you the truth regarding your lost love," and she looked into my face with her sad, serious eyes.