“Your faithful and loving friend,

“Helen Cardross.”

Thus she had written, and thus he sat and read—­these two, who had been and were so dear to one another.  Perhaps the good angels, who watch over human lives and human destinies, might have looked with pity upon both.

As for Helen’s father, and Helen herself too, if (as some severe judges may say) they erred in suffering themselves to be thus easily deceived —­in believing a man upon little more than his own testimony, and in loving him as bad men are sometimes loved, under a strong delusion, by even good women, surely the errors of unworldliness, unselfishness, and that large charity which “thinketh no evil” are not so common in this world as to be quite unpardonable.  Better, tenfold, to be sinned against than sinning.

   “Better trust all, and be deceived,
   And weep that trust and that deceiving,
   Than doubt one heart which, if believed,
   Had bless’d one’s life with true believing.”

Lord Cairnforth did not think this at the time, but he learned to do so afterward.  He learned, when time brought round its divine amende, neither to reproach himself so bitterly, nor to blame others; and he knew it was better to accept any sad earthly lot, any cruelty, deceit, or wrong inflicted by others, than to have hardened his heart against any living soul by acts of causeless suspicion or deliberate injustice.

Meanwhile, the marriage was accomplished.  All that Helen’s fondest friend could do was to sit and watch the event of things, as the earl determined to watch—­silently, but with a vigilance that never slept.  Not passively neither.  He took immediate steps, by means which his large fortune and now wide connection easily enable him to employ, to find out exactly the position of Helen’s husband, both his present circumstances, and, so far as was possible, his antecedents, at home or abroad.  For after the discovery of so many atrocious, deliberate lies, every fact that Captain Bruce had stated concerning himself remained open to doubt.

However, the lies were apparently that sort of falsehood which springs from a brilliant imagination, a lax conscience, and a ready tongue—­ prone to say whatever comes easiest and upper most.  Also, because probably following the not uncommon Jesuitical doctrine that the end justifies the means, he had, for whatever reason he best knew, determined to marry Helen Cardross, and took his own measures accordingly.

The main facts of his self-told history turned out to be correct.  He was certainly the identical Ernest Henry Bruce, only surviving son of Colonel Bruce, and had undoubtedly been in India, a captain in the Company’s service.  His medals were veritable—­won by creditable bravery.  No absolute moral turpitude could be discovered concerning him —­only a careless, reckless life; and utter indifference to debt; and a convenient readiness to live upon other people’s money rather than his own—­qualities not so rare, or so sharply judged in the world at large, as they were likely to be by the little world of innocent, honest Cairnforth.