After some hesitation she had made up her mind to tell him of her new-found knowledge, and at once he had filled in and coloured the sketchy outlines of the picture drawn by the rather foolish if kindly natured Miss Weatherfield.  Yes, it was true that he had been a fool, though a quixotic fool—­so Blanche had felt on hearing his version of the story.  At the time of the marriage Varick had been nineteen, his wife five years older.  The two had soon parted, but they had made up their differences after a separation which lasted four years.  Varick’s fortunes had then been at their lowest ebb, and the two had drifted to Chichester, where Mrs. Varick had humble, respectable relations.  After a while the woman had fallen ill, and finally died.  Blanche had seen how it had pained and disturbed Varick to rake out the embers of the past, and neither had ever referred to the sad story again.

* * * * *

And now, from considering the past, Blanche Farrow turned shrinkingly to the present.

In common with the rest of the world, she had at times followed the course of some great murder trial; and she had been interested, as most intelligent people are occasionally interested, in the ins and outs of more than one so-called “poisoning mystery.”

But such happenings had seemed utterly remote from herself; and to her imagination the word “murderer” had connoted an eccentric, cunning, mentally misshapen monster, lacking all resemblance to the vast bulk of human kind.  She tried to realize that, if Mark Gifford’s tale were true, a man with whom she herself had long been in close sympathy, and whose peculiar character she had rather prided herself on understanding, had been—­nay, was—­such a monster.

Blanche felt a touch of shuddering repulsion from herself, as well as from Varick, as she now remembered how sincerely she had rejoiced when, reading between the lines of his letter, she had guessed that he was marrying an unattractive woman for her money.  It was now a comfort to feel that, even so, she had certainly felt a sensation of disgust when it had come to her knowledge that Varick had assumed, with regard to that same unattractive woman, an extravagant devotion she felt convinced he did not—­could not—­feel.  It had shocked her, made her feel uncomfortable, to hear Helen Brabazon’s artless allusions to the tenderness and devotion he had lavished on “poor Milly.”

Helen Brabazon?  A sensation of pain, almost of shame, swept over Blanche Farrow.  Were Helen to appear as witness in a cause celebre the girl’s life would henceforth be shadowed and smirched by an awful memory.  And then there rose before her mind another dread possibility.  Was it not possible—­nay, probable—­that she, Blanche Farrow, would be sucked into the vortex?

She remembered a case in which the prisoner had been charged with the murder of a relation through whose death he had received considerable benefit, and how four or five men and women of repute had been called to testify to his high character, and to the kindness of his heart.  But their evidence had availed him nothing, for he had been hanged.