“I’ll write to him,” said Mr Pennycuick, grinding his teeth—­“I’ll write to him!” It was the tone in which he might have said, “I’ll wring his neck for him!”

But when Mary came round and perceived his mood and intentions, she implored him not to write—­went on her knees, and almost shrieked in her frantic fear of his doing so.

“Oh, father, don’t—­don’t!  If he does not remember—­if he does not want to come—­you would not drag him by force?  And he never bound himself—­he never really asked me; very likely he did not mean anything, after all.”

“Not mean anything!” shouted the indignant father.  “He can kiss a girl —­a daughter of mine—­and not mean anything!  I’ll make him tell me whether he dared not to mean anything—­”

“No, father,” commanded Deb.  “You must not write to him.  It is not for a Pennycuick to fling herself at any man’s head.  Let him alone; we don’t want him.  Treat him—­as I hope Molly is going to do—­with the contempt that he deserves.”

Mr Pennycuick stormed and muttered, but obeyed; and for two days Captain Carey was left to the anathemas of Redford and the countryside as a heartless jilt, to Mary’s extreme anguish.  She tried to water down the concoction that she stood answerable for, to take blame off him and put it on herself; but she dared not go far enough to convince anybody that she was not sacrificing herself to shield him.

It was a horrible position for a delicate-minded and even high-minded girl, and the misery of it was aggravated by the constant effort to efface its signs and evidences.  She was left with no outlook in life but to get through twenty, thirty, forty years somehow, and come to a little peace at last, when everything would be forgotten; and her one forlorn hope was that Guthrie would not discover her crime—­ would keep up the neglect with which he had treated his old friends, and not come near them.

He might have done this—­for the fact was that he now had a dawning “affair” in another quarter—­had not Frances intervened.  To her, inaction at such a crisis was intolerable, and since nobody else would do it, she wrote to Guthrie Carey herself.  She wrote, she said, to welcome him back to life and to Australia, and to congratulate him on being a captain; incidentally she mentioned other matters, and asked innocent-seeming questions which she was well aware could only be answered in person.

Frances, since his first acquaintance with her, had shot up into a slim, tall girl, exquisite in colouring and the daintiness of her figure and face.  Although unlike Deb in every way, people were beginning to compare them as rival beauties—­Frances’ private opinion being that there was no comparison.  She had nearly done with governesses, short frocks and pigtails, and was ardently anticipating the power and glory coming to her when she should be a full-grown woman.

Two days after the clandestine postage of her letter to Captain Carey, a new housemaid brought Mary his visiting-card on a silver tray.  Mary knew, before looking at it—­having heard nothing of the letter, and no sound of his arrival in his hired buggy—­what name it bore.  Her forlorn hope had been too forlorn to stand for anything but despair.  She had expected the catastrophe from the first.