“You are right, Dick,” she said at last,“and you show your sense in talking the way you have; though, if you loved as I do, you could not do it. But, once more, there’s no other woman that you’re fonder of than me? It isn’t that that makes you so good? Dick Marston good!” and here she laughed bitterly. “If I thought that I should go mad.”

What was I to do? I could not tell her that I loved Gracey Storefield ten times as much as I’d ever cheated myself into thinking I cared about her. So I swore that I cared more for her than any woman in the whole world, and always had done so.

This steadied her. We parted good friends, and she promised to keep quiet and try to make the best of things. She turned up the lamp to show me the way out, though the outer door of the hall was left open night and day. It was a way we had at the Turon; no one troubled themselves to be particular about such trifles as furniture and so on. There was very little small robbery there; it was not worth while. All petty stealers were most severely punished into the bargain.

As I stood up to say good-bye a small note dropped out of my breast-pocket. It had shifted somehow. Kate always had an eye like an hawk. With one spring she pounced upon it, and before I could interfere opened and read it; it was Gracey Storefield’s. She stood for one moment and glared in my face. I thought she had gone mad. Then she threw the bit of paper down and trampled upon it, over and over again.

“So, Dick Marston,” she cried out hoarsely, her very voice changed,“you have tricked me a second time! Your own Gracey! your own Gracey! and this, by the date, at the very time you were letting me persuade myself, like a fool, like an idiot that I was, that you still care for me! You have put the cap to your villainy now. And, as God made me, you shall have cause—good cause—to fear the woman you have once betrayed and twice scorned. Look to yourself.”