Lord Arleigh hesitated for one half minute.

“What good can it possibly do?” he said.

“I am a great believer in the good old proverb that two heads are better than one,” replied the earl.  “I think it is just possible that I might have some idea that has not occurred to you; I might see some way out of the difficulty, that has not yet presented itself to you.  Please yourself about it; either trust me or not, as you will; but if you do trust me, rely upon it I shall find some way of helping you.”

“It is a hopeless case,” observed Lord Arleigh, sadly.  “I am quite sure that even if you knew all about it, you would not see any comfort for me.  For my wife’s sake I hesitate to tell you, not for my own.”

“Your wife’s secret will be as safe with me as with yourself,” said the earl.

“I never thought that it would pass my lips, but I do trust you,” declared Lord Arleigh; “and if you can see any way to help me, I shall thank Heaven for the first day I met you.  You must hold my wife blameless, Lord Mountdean,” he went on.  “She never spoke untruthfully, she never deceived me; but on our wedding-day I discovered that her father was a convict—­a man of the lowest criminal type.”

Lord Mountdean looked as he felt, shocked.

“But how,” he asked, eagerly, “could you be so deceived?”

“That I can never tell you; it was an act of fiendish revenge—­cruel, ruthless, treacherous.  I cannot reveal the perpetrator.  My wife did not deceive me, did not even know that I had been deceived; she thought, poor child, that I was acquainted with the whole of her father’s story, but I was not.  And now, Lord Mountdean, tell me, do you think I did wrong?”

He raised his care-worn, haggard face as he asked the question and the earl was disturbed at sight of the terrible pain in it.

Chapter XXXVII.

The reason of his separation from his wife revealed, Lord Arleigh again put the question: 

“Do you think, Lord Mountdean, that I have done wrong?”

The earl looked at him.

“No,” he replied, “I cannot say that you have.”

“I loved her,” continued Lord Arleigh, “but I could not make the daughter of a convict the mistress of my house, the mother of my children.  I could not let my children point to a felon’s cell as the cradle of their origin.  I could not sully my name, outrage a long line of noble ancestors, by making my poor wife mistress of Beechgrove.  Say, if the same thing had happened to you, would you not have acted in like manner?”

“I believe that I should,” answered the earl, gravely.

“However dearly you might love a woman, you could not place your coronet on the brow of a convict’s daughter,” said Lord Arleigh.  “I love my wife a thousand times better than my life, yet I could not make her mistress of Beechgrove.”

“It was a cruel deception,” observed the earl—­“one that it is impossible to understand.  She herself—­the lady you have made your wife—­must be quite as unhappy as yourself.”