ned. Then sudden
remembrance stunned him: Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, had another
wife. He remembered--it had been burned into his brain the day he saw
it first in the Gazette de Jersey--that he had married the Comtesse
Chantavoine, niece of the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, upon the very day,
and but an hour before, the old Duc de Bercy suddenly died. It flashed
across his mind now what he had felt then. He had always believed that
Philip had wronged Guida; and long ago he would have gone in search of
him--gone to try the strength of his arm against this cowardly marauder,
as he held him--but his father's ill-health had kept him where he was,
and Philip was at sea upon the nation's business. So the years had gone
on until now.

His brain soon cleared. All that he had ever thought upon the matter
now crystallised itself into the very truth of the affair. Philip had
married Guida secretly; but his new future had opened up to him all
at once, and he had married again--a crime, but a crime which in high
places sometimes goes unpunished. How monstrous it was that such vile
wickedness should be delivered against this woman before him, in whom
beauty, goodness, power were commingled! She was the real Princess
Philip d'Avranche, and this child of hers--now he understood why she
allowed Guilbert to speak no patois.

They scarcely knew how long they stood silent, she with her hand
stroking the child's golden hair, he white and dazed, looking, looking
at her and the child, as the thing resolved itself to him. At last, in
a voice which neither he nor she could quite recognise as his own, he
said:

"Of course you live now only for Guilbert."

How she thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid,
those things which clear-eyed and great-minded folk, high or humble,
always understand. There was no selfish lamenting, no reproaches, none
of the futile banalities of the lover who fails to see that it is no
crime for a woman not to love him. The thing he had said was the thing
she most cared to hear.

"Only for that, Ranulph," she answered.

"When will you claim the child's rights?"

She shook her head sadly. "I do not know," she answered with hesitation.
"I will tell you all about it."

Then she told him of the lost register of St. Michael's, and about
the Reverend Lorenzo Dow, but she said nothing as to why she had kept
silence. She felt that, man though he was, he might divine something of
the truth. In any ca