ent Ada felt as if she could not proceed. Her heart accused
her of neglecting home for the past few days, and she told herself that,
with the rumours she knew of floating around, she ought not to have
stayed away. But at last, with an effort, she hurried forward, opened
the door, and entered the room just as, with a cry of rage, Sir Murray
Gernon raised the hunting-whip he held in his hand, and struck her
husband furiously across the face.

"Dog!" he exclaimed. "I gave you the chance of meeting me as a
gentleman, and you refused, driving me to horsewhip you as the scoundrel
and thief you are. Ha!"

He paused, for Ada Norton was clinging to the arm that held the whip,
while her husband--

Was he a coward? Was that the man of whose daring she had heard in
India, performing deeds of valour that had been chronicled again and
again in the despatches sent home? She was no lover of strife, but it
was with something akin to shame that she saw her husband stand
motionless, with one hand pressed to the red weal across his face. He
was very pale, and the old scar and the new seemed to intersect one
another, the latter like a bar sinister across honourable quarterings.
He was trembling, too, but it was with a sigh of relief that she heard
him break the silence at last.

"Sir Murray Gernon," he said, in a cracked voice that she hardly knew,
"when your poor dying wife came here with you, we walked through that
window into the garden, where, in memory of our old love, she made me
swear that I would never injure you, a promise--I hardly know why--that,
though I made, I never even mentioned to my wife."

Sir Murray laughed scornfully.

"I tell you now again, in the presence of my wife here, that your
suspicions are baseless, that you wrong Lady Gernon most cruelly; and
that, but for the fact that you dared call me--a poor, but honourable
soldier--thief, your last charge is so contemptible that it would not be
worthy of an answer. Go now and try to undo the wrong you have done.
Thief! robber!" he exclaimed, excitedly. "Who was the thief of my
love--of my life? But there; I have done," he said, calmly. "I
thought," he continued, tenderly, "that hope was crushed out of my
existence; that there was to be no future for me. That day, when I cast
myself down in the churchyard with the feeling of despair heavy upon me,
it seemed as if, with one harsh blow, my life had been snapped in two.
And it was nearly so; but Heaven sent