Biddy’s fingers closed claw-like upon it.  “Whist now, Miss Dinah!” she said.  “If Sir Eustace was to hear me, sure, he’d wring the neck on me like as if I was an old fowl.  But ye’ve asked me what’s happened, mavourneen, and sure, I’ll tell ye.  For it’s the pretty young lady that ye are and a cruel shame that ye should ever belong to the likes of him.  It’s his doing, Miss Dinah, every bit of it, and it’s the truth I’m speaking, as the Almighty Himself could tell ye if He’d a mind to.  The poor lamb was fading away aisy like, but he came along and broke her heart.  It was them letters, Miss Dinah.  He took ’em.  And he burned ’em, my dear, he burned ’em, and when ye were gone she missed ’em, and then he told her what he’d done, told her brutal-like that it was time she’d done with such litter.  He said it was all damn’ nonsense that she was wasting her life over ’em and over the dead.  Oh, it was wicked, it was cruel.  And she—­poor innocent—­she locked herself up when he’d gone and cried and cried and cried till the poor heart of her was broke entirely.  She said she’d lost touch with her darling husband and he’d never come back to her again.”

“Biddy!” Horror undisguised sounded in Dinah’s low voice.  “He never did such a thing as that!”

“He did that!” A queer species of triumph was apparent in Biddy’s rejoinder; malice twinkled for a second in her eyes.  “I’ve told ye!  I’ve told ye!” she said.  And then, with sharp anxiety.  “But ye’ll not tell anyone as ye know, Miss Dinah.  Ye promised, now didn’t ye?  Miss Isabel wouldn’t that any should know—­not even Master Scott.  He was away when it happened, dining down at the Vicarage he was.  And Miss Isabel she says to me, ‘For the life of ye, don’t tell Master Scott!  He’d be that angry,’ she says, ’and Sir Eustace would murder him entirely if it came to a quarrel.’  She was that insistent, Miss Dinah, and I knew there was truth in what she said.  Master Scott has the heart of a lion.  He never knew the meaning of fear from his babyhood.  And Sir Eustace is a monster of destruction when once his blood’s up.  And he minds what Master Scott says more than anyone.  So I promised, Miss Dinah dear, the same as you have.  And so he doesn’t know to this day.  Sir Eustace, ye see, has been in a touchy mood all along, ever since ye left.  Like gunpowder he’s been, and Master Scott has had a difficult enough time with him; and Miss Isabel has kept it from him so that he thinks it was just your going again that made her fret so.  There, now ye know all, Miss Dinah dear, and don’t ye for the love of heaven tell a soul what I’ve told ye!  Miss Isabel would never forgive me if she came to know.  Ah, the saints preserve us, what’s that?”

A brisk tap at the door had made her jump with violence.  She went to parley with a guilty air.

In a moment or two she shut the door and came back.  “It’s that flighty young French hussy, Miss Dinah; her they call Yvonne.  She says Sir Eustace is waiting for ye downstairs.”