“Well, his ship—­the Pegasus—­was bringing him home after two years on the Australian station. . . .  Heaven help me!  I’m an old sportswoman now, and understand something of the male animal and his passions.  In those days I must have been—­or so it strikes me, looking back—­a sort of plain-featured Diana; ’chaste huntress’—­isn’t that what they called her?  At any rate, the story shocked, even sickened, me a little at the time. . . .  It appears that the night before making Plymouth Sound he made a bet in the wardroom—­a bet of fifty pounds—­that he’d marry the first woman he met ashore.  Pretty mad, was it not?—­even for a youngster coming home penniless, with no prospects, and to a home he hated; for his father and mother were dead, and he and his elder brother Anthony had never been able to hit it off. . . .  On the whole, you may say he got better than he deserved.  For some reason or other they halted the Pegasus outside the Hamoaze—­dropped anchor in Cawsand Bay, in fact; and there, getting leave for shore, the young fool met his fate on Cawsand quay.  She was a coast-guard’s daughter—­a decent girl, I’ve heard, and rather strikingly handsome.  I’ll leave it to you what he might have found if he’d happened to land at Plymouth. . . .  He got more than half-drunk that night; but a day or two later, when the ship was paid off, he went back from Plymouth to Cawsand, and within a week he had married her.  Then it turned out that fate had been nursing its stroke.  At Sidmouth, on the second day of the honeymoon, a redirected telegram reached him, and he learnt that by Anthony’s death Meriton was his, and the title with it.  He left his bride at once, and posted up to Meriton for the funeral, arriving just in time; and there I saw him, for we all happened to be at Culvercoombe for the shooting, and women used to attend funerals in those days. . . .  No one knew of the marriage; but that same evening he rode over to Culvercoombe, asked for a word with me in private, and told me the whole story—­pluckily enough, I am bound to say.  God knows what I had expected those words in private to be; and perhaps in the revulsion of learning the truth I lashed out on him. . . .  Yes, I had a tongue in those days—­have still, for that matter; not a doubt but I made him feel it.  The world, you see, seemed at an end for both of us.  I had no mother to help me, and my brother Elphinstone’s best friend wouldn’t call him the man to advise in such a business.  Moreover, where was the use of advice?  The thing was done, past undoing. . .  Oh,” Miss Sally went on, “you are not to think I broke my heart over it.  As I’ve tried to explain, I was disgusted rather:  I loathed the man, and—­and—­well, this is not the history of Sally Breward, so once more we’ll get back to Miles Chandon. . . .  He rode off; but he didn’t ride back to Sidmouth.  In his rage he did a thing that, I now see, was far baser than his original folly.  I saw it as soon as my mind cleared; but—­since this is a confession of a sort—­ I didn’t see it at the time, for I hated the woman.  He wrote her a letter; stuck a cheque inside, I dare say—­he was brute enough just then; and told her she might claim her price if she chose, but that he would never see her again. . . .  She went back to her coast-guard people.”