g that. I went up
this morning to the address she gave me. I saw her. She told me worse
than she wrote--poor wretch! I didn't take it for gospel. I got
confirmation, all round. There isn't room for the shadow of a doubt.
She left her husband a year ago for Marston----"

"A year ago? Only a year?"

"A year. The husband got a divorce; this brute refused to marry her."

"Oh, Hugh!"

"It's worse. I can't tell you all. Sufficient that he played the
traitor, the coward, the beast. Left her to face shame, and poverty,
and--everything, alone."

"Can it be so bad! You are certain?"

He lifted the unsteady hand and laid it open, heavily again upon the
table where the Crown Derby coffee services, the silver inkstands,
muffineers and bridge boxes, whose donors had not even been thanked,
jingled with a tiny music once more.

"Certain. Now, don't keep repeating that word, Hannah. I don't want to
waste time producing proofs, but I've got them. It's as certain as
death. And it's not the only thing. Once I was on his track--late in
the day as it was--I learnt more. We live so in a hole, down here, and
nothing like this has ever come near us. We've taken people for what
they seemed to be--as I, ass that I was, took Marston--and never poked
into their histories. The man's got a bad record, all along. Decent
people have closed their doors in his face."

"_What_ will you do, Hugh? What _can_ you do now?"

"Do? Stop the marriage," he said. He glared for a minute upon the
costly display on the table, then turned his back on it all, and
carried his white face to the window. "My sister shall never marry that
scoundrel," he said.

"Daphne's heart will break."

"I know." He looked out on the wintry landscape with gloomy eyes, and a
resolutely held underlip. "That is what my mother says. I do not
believe it; but if it is so, it does not alter what is the right and
only course to take."

"What else does your mother say?"

He moved his shoulders impatiently. "That the wedding must go on; that
it is too late to draw back." He turned swiftly upon me. "Could you
have believed that _my mother_, of all people, could take such a view
as that?"

"I can see how she feels about it. To break it off now is too hideously
painful----"

"And what will it be for Daphne if it goes on? Don't you suppose her
life with a brute like that would be hideously painful?" He held the
back of his hand to his forehead for a moment and shut his eyes tightly