les, who allowed his daughter to mate
with a blackguard."

"Father, curb your tongue," cried Dora, flashing out angrily. Her color
was rising, and that determined little mouth, which had excited the
admiration of Herresford, was set in a hard, straight line. The colonel
was red in the face, and emphasizing his words with his clenched fists,
as if he were threatening to strike.

Dora was the first to recover her composure. She turned away with a
shrug, and walked out of the room to put an end to the discussion.

Her joy at Dick's return from the grave was short-lived. The appalling
difficulty of the situation was making itself felt. She left the colonel
to ramp about the house, muttering, and shut herself in her boudoir,
where she proceeded to make short work of everything associated with
Vivian Ormsby. His photograph was torn into little pieces; the gifts with
which he had loaded her were collected together in a heap; his letters
were burned without a sigh. She would have been sorry for him, if he had
not conspired with her father to conceal the truth about Dick's supposed
death. She shuddered to think what her position would have been, if she
had married Ormsby, and then discovered, when the die was cast, that
Dick, her idol, the only one who had touched a responsive chord in her
heart, was living, and set aside by fraud.

The scrape into which Dick had got himself could not really be as serious
as her father imagined, since the grandfather of the culprit had spoken
of it so lightly--and, in any case, the crime of forgery never horrifies
a woman as do the supposedly meaner crimes of other theft and of
violence. It was surely something that could be put right, and, if it
could not, then it would become a battle of heart against conscience.
But, at present, love held the field.

It was absolutely necessary to see Dick, and get information on all
points; and, as it was quite impossible to extract information from her
father as to her lover's whereabouts, the rectory seemed to be the most
likely place to gather news. To the rectory, therefore, she went.

Dick was upstairs, ill. When her name was taken in to the clergyman--she
chose the father in preference to the mother from an instinctive distrust
of Mrs. Swinton which she could not explain--John Swinton trembled.
Cowardice suggested that he should avoid her questioning. He knew why she
came; and was not prepared with the answer to the inevitable inquiry,
"Where is