"Oh, come now," Monk retorted. "You know as well as I do that not all young women marry for love! They marry suitably, or as opportunity is offered them." He knew this from Hester, and from some of the cases he had taken in his private capacity. The pressure and the humiliation of it barely touched the edges of his experience, but he had seen the marriage market at work, young women paraded like bloodstock for farmers to bid on.

Cardman was caught in an impossible situation. His expression registered his embarrassment and his understanding. Perhaps grief, and the knowledge that he no longer had a mistress to serve, broke down his resistance.

"Yes, sir," he admitted uncomfortably. "I think Miss Havilland did feel rather that she was taking the best offer that she had, and it would be the right thing to do in accepting Mr. Toby."

Monk had expected that answer, and yet it grieved him. The young woman with the passionate face whom he had pulled from the river deserved better than that, and would have hungered for it more than some. "And she broke the agreement after her fathers death?"

"Yes, sir." Cardman's voice dropped and there was a huskiness that once again betrayed his emotion. "She was very distressed by his death indeed. We all were."

"How did it happen?"

Cardman hesitated again, but he seemed to know that Monk would not allow him to go without first answering the question. Like Monk, Cardman was a leader in a tightly knit, hierarchical community with some of the most rigid rules on earth. And perhaps there was something in him that wanted to share his bewilderment and his pain with at least one other person.

"Mr. Havilland was a gentleman in the old sense of the term, sir," he began. "Not titled, you understand, and not with great wealth. He was fair to everybody, and he never carried a grudge. If any man wronged him and apologized, Mr. Havilland forgot the thing entirely. He was a good friend, but he never put friendship above what he thought was right, and he respected a poor man as much as a rich one, if that man was good to his word."

Monk was aware that Cardman was watching him, to see if he caught the unspoken thread bright between the words.

"I see," Monk acknowledged. "Much to be admired, but not one to take the way of many in society, or in business, either." He did not remember his days in merchant banking-they were gone with all the rest of his memory-but he had learned, piece by piece, much about the cost and the dishonor of some of his own acts, and those of people he had loved who had been ruined.