ourselves, than by those patent to the world. In all North Aston, Mr.
Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the
slightest connection with the people. He had come there by accident and
by choice lived in retirement, though also by choice he had not been
there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every
individual for miles round. The merest chances had made him personally
acquainted with Sebastian Dundas--those chances his tenancy of Lionnet
and the slight attack of fever which called forth his landlord's
sentiment and pity. Through the father he came to know the daughter,
when the prying curiosity of his nature, his liking for secret influence
and concealed action, together with the kind heart at bottom, and his
real affection for the girl whose confidence he had partly forced and
partly won, threw the whole secret into his hands and made him master of
the situation--the keeper of the seal set against the writings whom no
one suspected of complicity. This was exactly the kind of thing he
liked, and the kind of thing that suited him, human mole, born detective
and conspirator as he was.

When Leam met him in the wood on the evening of her confession to Edgar,
she met him with the deliberate intention of confessing her fearful
secret to him too, and of asking him to help her to escape, like the
friend which he had promised he would be. She knew that it was
impossible for her now to live at North Aston, and the sole desire she
had was to be blotted out, as she had been.

There was no excitement about her, no feverish exaltation that would
burn itself cold before twenty-four hours were over--only the dead
dreariness of heartbreak, the tenacious resolution of despair. She
neither wept nor wrung her hands, but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her
terrible story in the low and level tones in which a Greek Fate might
have spoken, as sad and as immutable. She had sinned, and now had made
such atonement as she could by confession--to her lover to save him from
pollution, to her father to cancel his obligations to her, to her friend
to be helped in her lifelong penance. This done, she had strengthened
herself to bear all that might come to her with that resignation of
remorse which demands no rights and inherits no joys. She was not one of
those emotional half-hearted creatures who resolve one day, break down
the next, and drift always. For good and evil alike she had the power to
hold w