And that was all my clean-souled Betty knew about it!  She had no idea of deeper faithlessness; no suspicion of Boyce’s presence with Althea on the bank of the canal.  She stood pathetic in her half knowledge.  My heart ached.

From her pure woman’s point of view she had been justified in her denunciation of Boyce.  He had left her without a word.  A wall of silence came between them.  Then she learned the reason.  He had trifled with a young girl’s affections and out of despair she had drowned herself ....  But how had she learned?  I had to question her.  And it was then that she told me the story of Phyllis and her father to which I have made previous allusion:  how Phyllis, as her father’s secretary, had opened a letter which had frightened her; how her father’s crafty face had frightened her still more; how she had run to Betty for the easing of her heart.  And this letter was from Leonard Boyce.  “I cannot afford one penny more,” so the letter ran, according to Betty’s recollection of Phyllis’s recollection, “but if you remain loyal to our agreement, you will not regret it.  If ever I hear of your coupling my name with that of Miss Fenimore, I’ll kill you.  I am a man of my word.”  I think Betty crystallised Phyllis’s looser statement.  But the exact wording was immaterial.  Here was Boyce branding himself with complicity in the tragedy of Althea, and paying Gedge to keep it dark.  Like Sir Anthony, Betty remembered trivial things that assumed grave significance.  There was no room for doubt.  Catastrophe following on his villainy had kept Boyce away from Wellingsford, had terrified him out of his engagement.  And so her heart had grown bitter against him.  You may ask why her knowledge of the world had not led her to suspect blacker wrong; for a man does not pay blackmail because he has led a romantic girl into a wrong notion of the extent of his affection.  My only answer is that Betty was Betty, clean-hearted and clean-souled like the young Artemis she resembled.

And now she proclaimed that he had expiated his offence.  She proclaimed her renewed and passionate interest in the man.  I saw that deep down in her heart she had always loved him.

After telling me about Phyllis, she returned to the point where she had broken off.  She supposed that Gedge had been talking all over the place.

“I don’t think so, dear,” said I.  “So far as I know he has only spoken, first to Randall Holmes—­that was what made him break away from Gedge, whose society he had been cultivating for other reasons than those I imagined (you remember telling me Phyllis’s sorrowful little tale last year?).”  She nodded.  “And secondly to Sir Anthony and myself, a few hours before the Reception.”

She clenched her fists and broke out again.  “The devil!  The incarnate devil!  And Sir Anthony?”

“Pretended to treat Gedge’s story as a lie, threw into the fire without reading it an incriminating letter—­possibly the letter that Phyllis saw, ordered Gedge out of the house and, like a great gentleman, went through the ceremony.”