“Right?  Do you suppose a man gets his reputation by making mistakes?  You’re one of the new generation, Master Arnold.  You can all of you stare at a famous man; but you haven’t an atom of respect for his fame.  If Shakspeare came to life again, and talked of playwriting, the first pretentious nobody who sat opposite at dinner would differ with him as composedly as he might differ with you and me.  Veneration is dead among us; the present age has buried it, without a stone to mark the place.  So much for that!  Let’s get back to Blanche.  I suppose you can guess what the painful subject is that’s dwelling on her mind?  Miss Silvester has baffled me, and baffled the Edinburgh police.  Blanche discovered that we had failed last night and Blanche received that letter this morning.”

He pushed Anne’s letter across the breakfast-table.

Arnold read it, and handed it back without a word.  Viewed by the new light in which he saw Geoffrey’s character after the quarrel on the heath, the letter conveyed but one conclusion to his mind.  Geoffrey had deserted her.

“Well?” said Sir Patrick.  “Do you understand what it means?”

“I understand Blanche’s wretchedness when she read it.”

He said no more than that.  It was plain that no information which he could afford—­even if he had considered himself at liberty to give it—­would be of the slightest use in assisting Sir Patrick to trace Miss Silvester, under present circumstances, There was—­unhappily—­no temptation to induce him to break the honorable silence which he had maintained thus far.  And—­more unfortunately still—­assuming the temptation to present itself, Arnold’s capacity to resist it had never been so strong a capacity as it was now.

To the two powerful motives which had hitherto tied his tongue—­respect for Anne’s reputation, and reluctance to reveal to Blanche the deception which he had been compelled to practice on her at the inn—­to these two motives there was now added a third.  The meanness of betraying the confidence which Geoffrey had reposed in him would be doubled meanness if he proved false to his trust after Geoffrey had personally insulted him.  The paltry revenge which that false friend had unhesitatingly suspected him of taking was a revenge of which Arnold’s nature was simply incapable.  Never had his lips been more effectually sealed than at this moment—­when his whole future depended on Sir Patrick’s discovering the part that he had played in past events at Craig Fernie.

“Yes! yes!” resumed Sir Patrick, impatiently.  “Blanche’s distress is intelligible enough.  But here is my niece apparently answerable for this unhappy woman’s disappearance.  Can you explain what my niece has got to do with it?”

“I!  Blanche herself is completely mystified.  How should I know?”

Answering in those terms, he spoke with perfect sincerity.  Anne’s vague distrust of the position in which they had innocently placed themselves at the inn had produced no corresponding effect on Arnold at the time.  He had not regarded it; he had not even understood it.  As a necessary result, not the faintest suspicion of the motive under which Anne was acting existed in his mind now.