“The tragedy took place at a picnic, just before Gabrielle left her school at Amiens.  She placed poison in the girl’s wine.  Ah, it was a terrible revenge!”

“I am innocent!” cried the girl in despair.

“Remember the letter which you wrote to your mother concerning her.  You told Lady Heyburn that you hated her.  Do you deny writing that letter?  Because, if you do, it is still in existence.”

“I deny nothing which I have done,” she answered.  “You have told my father this in order to shield yourself.  You have endeavoured, as the coward you are, to prejudice me in his eyes, just as you compelled me to lie to him when you opened his safe and copied certain of his papers!”

“You opened the safe!” he protested.  “Why, I found you there myself!”

“Enough!” she exclaimed quite coolly.  “I know the dread charge against me.  I know too well the impossibility of clearing myself, especially in the face of that letter I wrote to Lady Heyburn; but it was you and she who entrapped me, and who held me in fear because of my inexperience.”

“Tell us the truth, the whole truth, darling,” urged Murie, standing at her side and taking her hand confidently in his.

“The truth!” she said, in a strange voice as though speaking to herself.  “Yes, let me tell you!  I know that it will sound extraordinary, yet I swear to you, by the love you bear for me, Walter, that the words I am about to utter are the actual truth.”

“I believe you,” declared her lover reassuringly.

“Which is more than anyone else will,” interposed Flockart with a sneer, but perfectly confident.  It was the hour of his triumph.  She had defied him, and he therefore intended to ruin her once and for all.

The girl was standing pale and erect, one hand grasping the back of a chair, the other held in her lover’s clasp, while her father had risen, his expressionless face turned towards them, his hand groping until it touched a small table upon which stood an old punch-bowl full of sweet-smelling pot-pourri.

“Listen, dad,” she said, heedless of Flockart’s remark.  “Hear me before you condemn me.  I know that the charge made against me by this man is a terrible one.  God alone knows what I have suffered these last two years, how I have prayed for deliverance from the hands of this man and his friends.  It happened a few months before I left Amiens.  Lady Heyburn, you’ll recollect, rented a pretty flat in the Rue Leonce-Reynaud in Paris.  She obtained permission for me to leave school and visit her for a few weeks.”

“I recollect perfectly,” remarked her father in a low voice.

“Well, there came many times to visit us an American girl named Bryant, who was studying art, and who lived somewhere off the Boulevard Michel, as well as a Frenchman named Felix Krail and an Englishman called Hamilton.”

“Hamilton!” echoed Murie.  “Was his name Edgar Hamilton—­my friend?”