it seemed to him.  To talk of Rose wanting forgiveness.  Then a strange kind of sarcasm took hold of him.  So it was; she had not been able to believe in himself; he, Edmund, had not been ideal in any sense.  Therefore she had passed him by, and then a hero had come whom she had worshipped, and this was the end of it.  Every word in the paper burnt into him.  “Justice”—­how dared he?  “Made it as little painful as he could”—­it was insufferable, and the coward was beyond reach, had taken refuge whither human vengeance could not follow him.

He succeeded in leaving Rose’s house without betraying his feelings, but he felt that no good had come of this attempt, so far at any rate.  That night he slept badly, which he did pretty often, but he experienced an unusual sensation on waking.  He felt as if he had been working hard and in vain all night at a problem, and he suddenly said to himself, “The ring, the photograph, and the paper were of course meant for the other woman, and she has got whatever was meant for Rose.  Now if the thing that was meant for Rose was the will, Madame Danterre has got it now unless she has had the nerve to destroy it.”  He felt as if he had been an ass till this moment.  Then he went to see Mr. Murray, Junior, who listened with profound attention until he had finished what he had to tell him.

“Lady Rose has allowed you to see the paper, then?” he said at last.  “She has not even shown it to Lady Charlton.  He asked her pardon,” he mused, half to himself, “and said justice must be done.  I am afraid, Sir Edmund, that that points in the same direction as our worst fears—­that Madame Danterre was his wife.”

“But he would not have written such a letter as that to Rose; it is impossible.  ‘Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven.’  That sentence in connection with Lady Rose is positively grotesque, whereas it would be most fitting when addressed elsewhere.”

Mr. Murray could not see the case in the same light as Edmund.  He allowed the possibility of the scrap of paper and the ring having been sent to Rose by mistake, but he was not inclined to indulge in what seemed to him to be guesswork as to what conceivably had been intended to be sent to her in place of them.

“There is, too,” he argued, “a quite possible interpretation of the words of that scrap of paper.  It is possible that he was full of remorse for his treatment of Madame Danterre.  Sometimes a man is haunted by wrong-doing in the past until it prevents his understanding the point of view of anybody but the victim of the old haunting sin.  Remorse is very exclusive, Sir Edmund.  In such a state of mind he would hardly think of Lady Rose enough to realise the bearing of his words.  ’Forgive as you too hope to be forgiven’ would be an appeal wrung out from him by sheer suffering.  It is a possible cry from any human being to another.  Then as to the ring and the photograph, we have no proof that he put them in the envelope.  They may have been found on him and put into the envelope by the same hand that addressed it.  I quite grant you that those few words are extraordinary, but they can be explained.  But even if it were obvious that they were intended for somebody else, you cannot deduce from that, that another letter, intended for Lady Rose and containing a will, was sent elsewhere.”