Lord Fordyce controlled himself.  This thing must be thought out.

“No, Michael could not have known it,” after a moment or two he averred.  “He even laughed over the name when I told it to him, and said he had a scapegrace cousin out in Arizona and wondered if the husband could be the same——­”

Then further recollections came with a frightful stab of anguish, crushing all passion and anger and leaving only a sensation of pain, for he remembered that his friend had given him his word of honor that he would not interfere with him in his love-making—­and, indeed, would help him in every way he could, even to lending him Arranstoun for the honeymoon!  That letter of his, too, when he had gone from Heronac, saying in it casually he hoped that he, Henry, thought that he had played the game!—­Yes, it was all perfectly plain.  Michael had come there in all innocence, and could not be blamed.  He remembered numbers of things unnoticed at the time—­his own talk with Sabine when he had discussed Michael’s marriage—­and this brought him up suddenly to her side of the question.  Why, in heaven’s name, had she not told him the truth at once?  Why had she pretended not to recognize Michael?  For, however Michael might have started, since he, Henry, was not looking at him, Sabine, whose face he had been gazing into all the while, had shown no faintest recognition of him.  What a superb actress she must be!—­or perhaps, having only seen him those two times in her life, for those short moments, she really did not recognize him then.  The whole thing was so staggering in its hideous tragedy his brain almost refused to think; but he said this last thought aloud, and the priest’s strange sudden silence struck even his numbed sense.

“She had only seen him for such a little while—­they parted immediately after the wedding; it was merely an empty ceremony, you know.  Why, then, should she have had any haunting memories of him?”

The Pere Anselme avoided answering this question by asking another.

“You knew that the Seigneur of Arranstoun was wedded, it would seem.  How was that?”

Then Henry told him the outline of Michael’s story, and the cruel irony of fate in having made him himself leave the house before seeing Sabine struck them both.

“What can her reasons have been for not telling me all this time, Father?” the unhappy man asked at last, in a hopeless voice.  “Can you in any way guess?”

The Pere Anselme mused for a moment.

“I have my own thoughts upon the matter, my son.  We who live lonely lives very close to Nature get into the way of studying things.  I have, as I told you, made some deductions, but, if you will permit me to give you some counsel, I would tell you to go back to the chateau now, with no parti pris, and seek her immediately, and get her to tell you the whole truth yourself.  Of what good for you and me to speculate, since we neither of us know all the facts?—­or even, if our suppositions are correct——­” Then, as Lord Fordyce hesitated, he continued:  “The time has passed for reticence.  There should be no more avoiding of feared subjects.  Go, go, my son, and discover the entire truth.”