s I was sure it was Mark's corpse, I just said he had
lost a finger out West. I didn't think there was any harm in saying so,
as for all I knew he might have got it chopped off after leaving me. But
the face of the dead man was--as I thought--Mark's, and he called
himself Berwin, which, you know, Diana, is the name of the Manor, and
the scar was on the cheek. I know now it was all contrived by Ercole;
but then I was quite ignorant."

"When did you find out the truth?"

"After that cloak business. Ferruci came to me, and I told him what that
girl at Baxter's had said, and insisted that he should tell me the
truth. Well, he did, in order to force me to marry him, and then I told
him to go and make it right with the girl, so that when Mr. Denzil went
again she'd deny that Ercole had bought the cloak."

"She denied it, sure enough," said Lucian grimly. "Ferruci, before he
died, told me he had bribed her to speak falsely. What more did the
Count reveal to you, Mrs. Vrain?--the conspiracy?"

"Yes. He said he'd found Mark hiding at Salisbury, half mad with
morphia, and had taken him up to Mrs. Clear's, where it seems he went
mad altogether, so they locked him up as her husband in a lunatic
asylum. Ferruci also told me that he had seen Michael Clear on the
stage, and that as he was so like Mark, and was likely to die of drink
and consumption, he got him to play the part of Mark in Geneva Square,
under the name of Berwin. Mrs. Clear visited her husband there by
climbing over a back fence, and getting down a cellar, somehow."

"I know that," said Lucian. "It was Mrs. Clear's shadow I saw on the
blind. She was fighting with her husband, and when I rang the bell they
were both so alarmed that they left the house by the back way and got
into Jersey Street. Then Mrs. Clear went home, and the man himself came
round into the Square by the front way. That was how I met him. I
wondered how people were in the house during his absence. Mrs. Clear
told me all."

"Did she say why her husband made you examine the house?" asked Diana.

"No. But I expect he made me do so that I should not have my suspicions
about that back entrance. But, Mrs. Vrain, when Ferruci confessed that
your husband was alive, why did you not tell it to the world?"

"Well, I'd got the assurance money, you see," said Lydia, with shrewd
candour, "and I thought the company would make a fuss and take it
back--as I suppose they will now. Ferruci wanted me to marry him