“Every one knows Brighton,” I said.  “It is not often one meets an English lady who does not know it.”

She looked at me with the most charming and frank directness.

“I spent a few hours there once,” she said.  “From the little I saw of it I took it for a city of palaces.”

“It is a beautiful place,” I said.

She rose with languid grace and went to the table.

“I think I will ring for some tea,” she said.  “I am chill and cold in spite of the fire.  Mr. Ford, will you join me?”

CHAPTER VII.

My feelings when I reached my room that night were not to be envied.  I was as firmly convinced of the identity of the woman as I was of the shining of the sun.  There could not be any mistake; I had seen her face quite plainly in the moonlight, and it had been too deeply impressed on my mind for me to forget it, or to mistake it for another.  Indeed, the horror of the discovery was still upon me; my nerves were trembling; my blood was cold.  How could it be that my old friend Lance had made so terrible a mistake?  How could I bear to know that the wife whom he worshiped was a murderess?  What else she had been, I did not care even to think; whose child it was, or why she had drowned it, I could not, dare not think.

I could not sleep or rest; my mind and brain were at variance with themselves.  Frances Fleming seemed to me a fair, kind-hearted, loving, woman, graceful as fair; the woman I had seen on the Chain Pier was a wild, desperate creature, capable of anything.  I could not rest; the soft bed of eiderdown, the sheets of pure linen perfumed with lavender, the pillows, soft as though filled with down from the wings of a bird, could bring no rest to me.

If this woman were anything but what she seemed to be, if she were indeed a murderess, how dare she deceive Lance Fleming?  Was it right, just or fair that he should give the love of his honest heart, the devotion of his life, to a woman who ought to have been branded?  I wished a thousand times over that I had never seen the Chain Pier, or that I had never come to Dutton Manor House; yet it might be that I was the humble instrument intended by Providence to bring to light a great crime.  It seemed strange that of all nights in the year I should have chosen that one; it seemed strange that after keeping the woman’s face living in my memory for so long I should so suddenly meet it in life.  There was something more than mere coincidence in this; yet it seemed a horrible thing to do, to come under the roof of my dearest friend and ruin his happiness forever.

Then the question came—­was it not better for him to know the truth than to live in a fool’s paradise—­to take to his heart a murderess—­to live befooled and die deceived?  My heart rose in hot indignation against the woman who had blighted his life, who would bring home to him such shame and anguish as must tear his heart and drive him mad.