id, which will get friends over
the water out of trouble. Tom Flavell did me a good turn once, and he's
been in hiding these two years for--well, it don't much matter what, but
I've shoved that in with the rest, though it was never in my
line--never. He'll be able to go home now."

"Have not you confessed under your own name?"

"No," replied Raymond, with a curious remnant of that pride of race at
which it is the undisputed privilege of low birth and a plebeian
temperament to sneer. "I won't have my own name dragged in. I dropped it
years ago. I've confessed as Stephens, and I'll die and be buried as
Stephens. I'm not going to disgrace the family."

There was a constrained silence of some minutes.

"Would you like to see your sister?" asked Charles; but Raymond shook
his head with feeble decision.

"That man!" he said, suddenly, after a long pause. "That man in the
door-way! How did he come there?"

"There is no man in the door-way," said Charles, reassuringly. "There is
no one here but me."

"Last night," continued Raymond, "last night in the stables. I watched
him stand in the door-way."

Charles remembered how Dare had said Raymond had bolted out past him.

"That was Dare," he said; "the man who was to have been your
brother-in-law."

"Ah!" said Raymond with evident unconcern. "I thought I'd seen him
before. But he's altered. He's grown into a man. So he is to marry Ruth,
is he?"

"Not now. He was to have done, but a divorced wife from America has
turned up. She arrived at Vandon the day before yesterday. It seems the
divorce in America does not hold in England."

Raymond started.

"The old fox," he said, with feeble energy. "Tracked him out, has she?
We used to call them fox and goose when she married him. By ----, she
squeezed every dollar out of him before she let him go, and now she's
got him again, has she? She always was a cool hand. The old fox," he
continued, with contempt and admiration in his voice. "She's playing a
bold game, and the luck is on her side, but she's no more his wife than
I am, and she knows that perfectly well."

"Do you mean that the divorce was----"

"Divorce, bosh!" said Raymond, working himself up into a state of feeble
excitement frightful to see. "I tell you she was never married to him
legally. She called herself a widow when she married Dare, but she had a
husband living, Jasper Carroll, serving his time at Baton Rouge Jail,
down South, all the time. He died there