“What do they say?”

“Nothing!” Mildred exclaimed, indignantly—­“nothing but their own base suspicions!  She nearly fainted at first sight of him.  He showed her a picture, and she ran out of the room and fell into hysterics.  Since then he has written to her, and mysterious personages—­females in disguise—­visit him at the Blue Bell.  That is what they whisper, Everard; nothing more.”

“Nothing more!” echoed her mother.  “Quite enough, I think.  What would you have, Miss Kingsland?  Everard, who is this man?”

“You appear to know more than I do, mother.  He is an American—­a traveling photograph artist—­and my wife never laid eyes on him until she saw him, the day after our arrival, in the library.  As to the fainting and the hysterics, I chanced to be in the library all through that first interview, and I saw neither one nor the other.  I am sorry to spoil the pretty romance in which you take such evident delight, my good, kind, charitable mother; but truth obliges me to tell you it is a fabrication from beginning to end.  And now, if you will be good enough to tell me the name of the originator of this report, you will confer upon me the last favor I shall ever ask of you.  My wife’s honor is mine; and neither she nor I will ever set foot in a house where such stories are credited—­not only credited, but exulted in.  Tell me the name of your tale-maker, Lady Kingsland, and permit me to wish you good-evening.”

“Everard!” his sister cried, in agony.

But he cut her short with an impatient wave of his hand.

“Hush, Mildred; let my mother speak.”

“I have nothing to say.”  She stood haughtily before him, and they looked each other full in the face, mother and son.  “My tale-maker is the whole town.  You can not punish them all, Sir Everard.  There is truth in this story, or it never would have originated; and he has written to her—­that is beyond a doubt.  He had told it himself, and shown her reply.”

“It is as false as hell!” His eyes blazed like coals of fire.  “My wife is as pure as the angels, and any one who dares doubt that purity, even though it be the mother who bore me, is my enemy to the death!”

He dashed out of the house, mounted Sir Galahad, and rode away as if Satan and his hosts were after him.

“Mamma! mamma!” Mildred cried, in unutterable reproach, “what have you done?”

“Told him the truth, child.  It is better he should know it, although that knowledge parts us forever.”

Like a man gone mad the young baronet galloped home.  The sickly glimmer of the fitful moon shone on a face that would never be more ghastly in his coffin—­on strained eyes and compressed lips.  It seemed to him but an instant from the time he quitted The Grange until he dashed up the avenue at Kingsland, leaped off his foaming bay, and strode into the house.  Straight to his wife’s room he went, fierce, invincible determination in every line of his rigid face.