That Sir Geoffrey Barry should be in a considerable state of exasperation when he returned with his boarding-party from their frustrated intention to capture the Nederland, and take from her as many able-bodied men as he required, was no more than natural. For now he scarcely knew where to turn to procure the extra men whom the Admiralty continued to strenuously instruct him to obtain, and he began to fear that the great fleet preparing to go to sea and attack Conflans would not owe much more to his endeavours. Yet, exasperated as he might be, astonishment obtained the mastery over that feeling when Ariadne--who had refused to go to bed till he came back--informed him of what had happened in the Marshes that night.

"Great heavens!" he cried, in his first surprise, "this is too awful. What a vengeance! What a vengeance! And Anne in it, too. Yet," he continued, "she could scarcely have taken a more effective way of ridding herself of the man. The schooner will be captured beyond all doubt by Thurot, or Boisrose, or some of those French sailors, half corsairs and half naval officers. And then--well! then--at best it will be months, nay, perhaps years, of detention in a French fortress."

"And at worst?" asked Ariadne.

"At worst! Why--this," and he pointed downwards to the deck. "That, with perhaps a broadside into them."

"I pity the others," said Ariadne; "him I cannot pity. Oh! he was willing to undertake such a fiendish scheme to smuggle Anne and me into that loathsome ship, and would have succeeded had not Mr. Granger, who hoodwinked him into believing that he would help him, found means to catch him in a trap instead."

Whereon, in answer to Geoffrey's desire to be told all, his wife related everything that Anne had divulged on her return.

Extreme as Geoffrey's anger was--and in that anger he felt almost inclined to go ashore and punish Granger in some way for having dared use his wife's name as a means whereby to lure Bufton to his doom--surprise once more took possession of him when he heard Ariadne say--

"Poor Mr. Granger! What a sad fate has been his. Oh! Geoffrey, why did not you tell me before that, Lady Glastonbury was--was----"

"Tell you, child! Why, how could I tell you anything I did not know? 'Lady Glastonbury!' What was she to him that you speak thus?"

"Sophy Jervis was my dearest friend once at Gosport, and--as you know--she married Lord Glastonbury."

"Well! Ariadne."

"And Sophy Jervis was loved by, and herself loved madly, Lewis Granger."

"My God! And sacrificed herself to save him. Is that it?"

"It is, as I know now. Though not until to-night, when Anne told me all and enabled me to put one thing with another. And to-morrow," she continued, "I will show you her letters to me. Short of saying what the name of the man whom she loved was, she has told me all."

In the morning she did as she had said she would, and put in her husband's hands a small packet of letters which he read later, not without a man's compassion for the wrecked love of the unhappy pair, and with, too, much, doubt upon his part as to whether these letters from one woman to another should not have been sacred from any man's eyes. Yet, also, ere he had concluded the perusal, he understood that it was well that Ariadne had shown them to him.

For in these letters the whole story was narrated, as Granger had briefly told it to Anne overnight in the "Red Rover"; the story of the girl's mad love for the handsome young lieutenant and of his for her; of the delirious bliss of the earliest days of that love; days full of softest wishes and tenderest fears and hopes of happy years to come. Of happy years with him who, so cold to and disdainful of all others, was to her a slave--a slave, but a loving one! Then, while Geoffrey read on--knowing that, as he did so, the tears were in his eyes--the tale was told of how the blow had fallen; of how the man she loved was ruined and disgraced; and that he had committed a crime which would drive him forth from the society of all honest men, and out of the service he belonged to--nay! worse, might bring him to the gallows. Yet she saved him, saved him at last, at the cost of her own happiness in this world; by the perdition of her own soul. The man he had robbed, or attempted to rob, was, by Fortune's favour, one who had wooed her long and unsuccessfully; now he would spare him upon one condition. The condition that she resigned the man she loved, and wedded the man who loved her.

"And then," the last letter went on, "oh! my God, then, Ariadne, when I had been Lord Glastonbury's wife for six months, we learnt that the man I had loved was innocent, and that he was the tool of a designing villain. We learnt it through a letter written to my husband by a woman who had been the friend of that villain and was cognizant of the robbery he was meditating; by a woman who, discarded and cast off, had found means to communicate with Glastonbury, she imagining that the theft had succeeded. And, darling," the unhappy writer concluded, "my husband, though dissolute, is an honourable man; if he could find my unhappy lover he would tell him all, he would send him that woman's letter. It might yet go far to restore him to his proper place in the world. Meanwhile, he intends to write to the Lords of the Admiralty."

Geoffrey called Ariadne to him when he had finished the perusal of the letters, and told her that he had done so; then he said quietly--

"It was a pity Lady Glastonbury never mentioned her lover's name to you. By chance (since I have spoken of him so much of late) we should have been able to help him. Now, it is too late."

"Geoffrey!" she exclaimed, after a moment's meditation, "let me see him. Perhaps--perhaps--if I let him hear those letters read it might do much to reclaim him, low as he has fallen, and horrible as is the calling he follows."

"Yet the calling which I profit by," her husband made answer. "Therefore is he little worse, if any, than we who employ him. But," he continued, "what use in seeing him, Ariadne? What can you do?"

"If I told him all that Sophy has written; if I should plead with him to lead a better life--now that he has exacted so horrible a vengeance on the man who destroyed him--might I not prevail?"

"Prevail! What is there for him to do?"

"God knows! Yet something better than that which he doe............