le died, his servant came round and told
me all--he overheard the conversation you had with the Count, Mr.
Denzil. I was never so astonished in my life as to hear about Mrs. Clear
and her husband--and Mark alive--and--and--oh, Lord! isn't it dreadful?
Give me a glass of wine, Diana, or I'll go right off in a dead faint!"

In silence Miss Vrain poured out a glass of port and handed it to her
stepmother, who sipped it in a most tearful mood. Lucian looked at the
wretched little woman without saying a word, and wondered if, indeed,
she was as innocent as she made herself out to be. He thought that,
after all, she might be ignorant of Ferruci's plots, although she had
certainly benefited by them; but she was such a glib liar that he did
not know how much to believe of her story. However, she had hitherto
only given a general idea of her connection with the matter, so when she
had finished her wine, and was somewhat calmer, Lucian begged her to be
more explicit.

"Did you know--did you guess, or even suspect--that your husband was
alive?"

"Mr. Denzil," said Lydia, with unusual solemnity, "as I'm a married
woman, and not the widow I thought I was, I did not know that Mark was
alive! I'm bad, I daresay, but I am not bad enough to shut a man up in a
lunatic asylum and pretend he is dead, just to get money, much as I like
it. What I did about identifying the corpse was done in good faith."

"You really thought it was my father's body?" questioned Diana
doubtfully.

"I swear I did," responded Mrs. Vrain, emphatically. "Mark walked out of
the house because he thought I was carrying on with Ferruci, which I
wasn't. It was that Tyler cat who made the trouble between us, and Mark
was so weak and silly--half crazy, I think, with his morphia and
over-study--that he cleared right out, and I never knew where he had
gone to. When I saw that notice about the murdered man in Geneva Square,
who called himself Berwin, and was marked on the cheek, I thought he
might be my husband. When the coffin was opened, I really believed I saw
poor Mark's dead body. The face was just like his, and scarred in the
same way."

"What about the missing finger, Mrs. Vrain? If I remember, you even gave
a cause for its loss."

"Well, it was this way," replied Lydia, somewhat discomposed. "I knew
that Mark hadn't lost a finger when he left, but Ferruci said that if I
denied it the police might refuse to believe that the body was that of
my husband. So, a