“And that man was Doctor Oleander.”

“It was not!”

“Mr. Ingelow!”

“No, Mollie; never Guy Oleander.  He hadn’t the pluck.  He never cared for you enough.”

“But he did it twice.”

“Once only—­this last time—­stung, goaded into it by the lash of Mrs. Walraven’s waspish tongue.  But he is not the man who married you, whoever that man may be.  At least,” cooling down suddenly, as he saw the full blue eyes fixed upon him with piercing intentness, “I don’t believe it.”

“What do you believe, then, Mr. Ingelow?” Mollie said, slowly and suspiciously.

“That when you made Miriam the confidante of your story, on a certain night in your bedroom, Mrs. Carl Walraven overheard you.”

“Impossible!”

“Perhaps so; but you’ll find that’s the way of it.  She listened and heard, and patched it up with Mr. Rashleigh’s dinner-table tale, and confabulated with her cousin, and put him up to this last dodge.  She saw your advertisement in the paper, and understood it as well as you did, and Doctor Oleander was there in waiting.  You committed one unaccountable blunder.  You appointed ten for the nocturnal interview, and were at the place of the tryst at half past nine.  How do you explain that little circumstance?”

“It seems to me, Mr. Ingelow,” said Mollie, “that you must be a sorcerer.  How do you know all this?”

“Partly from Miriam, partly from my own inborn ingenuity, as a Yankee, in guessing.  Please answer my question.”

“I didn’t know I was before time.  It was later than half past nine by my watch when I quitted the house.  I remember listening for the clocks to strike ten as I reached Fourteenth Street.”

“You didn’t hear them?”

“No.”

“Of course not.  Your watch was tampered with, and that confirms my suspicion of Mrs. Walraven.  Believe me, Mollie, a trap was laid for you, and you were caught in it.  You never met ‘Black Mask’ that night.”

“If I thought so!” Mollie cried, clasping her hands.

“You will find it so,” Hugh Ingelow said, very quietly.  “Let that be Doctor Oleander’s punishment.  Make him confess his fraud—­make him confess Mrs. Walraven aided and abetted him—­to-night.”

“How can I?”

“Simply enough.  Accuse him and her before us all.  There will be no one present you can not trust.  Your guardian, Sir Roger, and myself know already.  Sardonyx is Mr. Walraven’s lawyer, and silence is a lawyer’s forte.”

“Well?” breathlessly.

“Accuse him—­threaten him.  Tell him you know his whole fraud from first to last.  Accuse her!  Tell him if he does not prove to your satisfaction he is the man who carried you off and married you, or if he refuses to own he is not the man, that he will go straight from the house to prison.  He knows you can fulfill the threat.  I think it will succeed.”

“And if he confesses he is not the man who married me—­if he acknowledges the fraud—­what then?”