of her life to see her sister,
once devoted purely to domestic interests, quick-tongued, cleanly,
severe, calvinistic, spend fruitless hours day by day seeking a futile
vengeance. Joan she had always thought of as a typical farmer's
housewife--severe with her tongue perhaps, shrewd, and a trifle of a
scold. But this woman who walked the streets of London in her solemn
black clothes, pale-faced, untiring, ever with that same glitter in her
eyes, was a revelation. She turned to Douglas suddenly.

"Douglas," she said, "did Joan care for you very much?"

"I should not have said so," he answered. "She was willing to marry me
when your father ordered it. You know what our engagement was like. We
were called into the parlour the Sunday morning before I--I--you
remember my trial Sunday at Feldwick?

"Well, he just turned to Joan and said, 'Joan, it is my will that you
marry Douglas.' She was evidently prepared, for she held out her hand to
me.

"'I am willing, Douglas,' she said. That was all. As for me, I was
certainly weak, but for the life of me I could think of nothing to say.
Then the chapel bell began to ring, and we were hurried away, and your
father solemnly announced our engagement as the people came together.
There was not any lovemaking, if that is what you mean."

"Yet, I think," she said, "that Joan must have cared. I sometimes think
that it is not the man whom she believes to have killed Father, for whom
she seeks--it is for the man who slighted her."

"I hope," he said, gravely, "that she may never find either. Let us
forget that such a person exists."

"Willingly," she answered, with a little shrug of the shoulders. "What
shall we talk about?"

"Ourselves."

"First of all then, why are you in evening dress on a Sunday?"

"Been out to dinner," he answered. "Let me tell you all about it."

He tried to let her understand something of the period of depression
through which he had passed, and he found her, as ever, wonderfully
sympathetic, quick to comprehend, keenly interested. They talked of his
novel, he told her of his new ideas, of the fancies which had come
dancing into his brain during the last few hours. But she was perhaps
more moved than at any time, when he spoke of that wonderful visit of
his to the Abbey. He tried to make her feel what it had meant to him,
and in a measure he succeeded. Suddenly he stopped--almost in the
middle of a sentence. He was astonished to realise how pretty she was.