At the end of December, when Nancy, according to their agreement, began to hope for his return, a letter in a very different tone burdened her with dismal doubts.  Tarrant had quarrelled with his friend.  He had discovered that Sutherland was little better than a swindler.  ’I see that the fellow’s professed energy was all sham.  He is the laziest scamp imaginable; lazier even than his boozing old father.  He schemes only to get money out of people; and his disappointment on finding that I have no money to lose, has shown itself at length in very gross forms.  I find he is a gambler; there has just been a tremendous row between him and an American, whom he is said to have cheated at cards.  Last year he was for several weeks in Mexico City, a place notorious for gambling, and there lost a large sum of money that didn’t belong to him.’  The upshot was that he could no longer advise Mr. Vawdrey to have anything to do with Sutherland.  But he must not leave the Bahamas yet; that would be most unwise, as he was daily gathering most valuable information.  Vawdrey might be induced to lend him a hundred pounds or so.  But he would write again very soon.

It was the close of January when he dated his next letter.  Vawdrey had sent him fifty pounds; this, however, was to include the cost of his return to England.  ’See, then, what I have decided.  I shall make a hurried tour through the West Indian Islands, then cross to the States, and travel by land to New York or Boston, seeing all I can afford to on the way.  If I have to come home as a steerage passenger, never mind; that, too, will be valuable experience.’  There followed many affectionate phrases, but Nancy’s heart remained cold.

He wrote next from Washington, after six weeks’ silence.  Difficulties of which he would speak at length in another letter had caused him to postpone answering the two letters he had received.  Nancy must never lose faith in him; his love was unshaken; before the birth of her child he would assuredly be back in England.  Let her address to New York.  He was well, but could not pretend to be very cheerful.  However, courage!  He had plans and hopes, of which she should soon hear.

After that, Nancy knew nothing of him, save that he was living in New York.  He wrote two or three times, but briefly, always promising details in the next epistle.  Then he ceased to correspond.  Not even the announcement of the child’s birth elicited a word from him.  One subsequent letter had Nancy despatched; this unanswered, she would write no more.

She was herself surprised at the calmness with which she faced so dreadful a possibility as desertion by the man she had loved and married, the father of her baby.  It meant, perhaps, that she could not believe such fate had really befallen her.  Even in Tarrant’s last short letter sounded a note of kindness, of truthfulness, incompatible, it seemed to her, with base cruelty.  ’I dreamt of you last night, dearest, and woke