At the Gildersleeves’, too, the house that day was alive with excitement.

Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her own room, flung herself wildly on the bed, and sobbed herself into a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time. She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour to ruin him.

She lay there some hours alone, in a high fever, before her mother came up to her room to fetch her. Mrs. Gildersleeve was a subdued and soft-voiced woman, utterly crushed, so people said, by the stronger individuality of that blustering, domineering, headstrong man, her husband. And to say the truth, the eminent Q.C. had taken all the will out of her in twenty-three years of obedient slavery. She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded, unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve’s account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or daughter. On the contrary, he was tender and indulgent to them to the last degree, as he understood those virtues. It was only by constant assertion of his own individuality, and constant repression or disregard of theirs, that he had broken his wife’s spirit and was breaking his daughter’s. He treated them as considerately as one treats a pet dog, doing everything for them that care and money could effect, except to admit for a moment their claim to independent opinions and actions of their own, or to allow the possibility of their thinking and feeling on any subject on earth one nail’s breadth otherwise than as he himself did.

At sight of Gwendoline, Mrs. Gildersleeve came over to the bed with a scared and startled air, felt her daughter’s face tenderly with her hands for a moment, and then cried in alarm, “Why, Gwennie, what’s this? Your cheeks are burning! Who on earth has been here? Has that horrid man come down again from London to worry you?”

Gwendoline looked up and tried to prevaricate. But conscience was too strong for her; the truth would out for all that. “Yes, mother,” she cried, after a pause, “and he said, oh, he said—I could never tell you what dreadful things he said. But he’s so wicked, so cruel! You never knew such a man! He thinks I want to marry Granville Kelmscott, and so he told me—” She broke off, of a sudden, unable to proceed, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing long and bitterly.

“Well, what did he tell you, dear?” Mrs. Gildersleeve asked, with that frightened air, as of a startled wild thing, growing deeper than ever upon her countenance as she uttered the question.

“He told me—oh, he told me—I can’t tell you what he told me; but he threatened to ruin us—he threatened it so dreadfully. It was a hateful threat. He seemed to have found out something that he knew would be our ruin. He frightened me to death. I never heard any one say such things as he did.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back in profound agitation. “Found out something that would be our ruin!” she cried, with white face all aghast. “Oh, Gwennie, what do you mean? Didn’t he tell you what it was? Didn’t he try to explain to you? He’s a wicked, wicked man—so cruel, so unscrupulous! He gets one’s secrets into his hands, by underhand means, and then uses them to make one do whatever he chooses. I see how it is. He wants to force us into letting him marry you—into making you marry him! Oh, Gwennie, this is hard. Didn’t he tell you at all what it was he knew? Didn’t he give you a hint what sort of secret he was driving at?”

Gwendoline looked up once more, and murmured low through her sobs, “No, he didn’t say what it was. He’s too cunning for that. But I think—I think it was something about Granville. Mother, I never told you, but you know I love him! I think it was something about HIM, though I can’t quite make sure. Some secret about somebody not being properly married, or something of that sort. I didn’t quite understand. You see, he was so discreetly vague and reticent.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back her face all aghast with horror. “Some secret—about somebody—not being properly married!” she repeated slowly, with wild terror in her eyes.

“Yes, mother,” Gwendoline gasped out, with an effort once more. “It was about somebody not being really the proper heir; he made me promise I wouldn’t tell; but I don’t know how to keep it. He was immensely full of it; it was an awful secret; and he said he would ruin us—ruin us ruthlessly. He said we were in his power, and he’d crush us under his heel. And, oh, when he said it, you should have seen his face. It was horrible, horrible. I’ve seen nothing else since. It dogs me—it haunts me.”

Mrs. Gildersleeve sat down by the bedside wringing her hands in silence. “It’s too late to-night,” she said at last, after a long deep pause, and in a voice like a woman condemned to death, “too late to do anything; but to-morrow your father must go up to town and try to see him. At all costs we must buy him off. He knows everything—that’s clear. He’ll ruin us. He’ll ruin us!”

“It’s no use papa going up to town, though,” Gwendoline answered half dreamily. “That dreadful man said he was going away for his holiday to the country at once. He’ll be gone to-morrow.”

“Gone? Gone where?” Mrs. Gildersleeve cried, in the same awestruck voice.

“To Devonshire,” Gwendoline replied, shutting her eyes hard and still seeing him.

Mrs. Gildersleeve echoed the phrase in a startled cry. “To Devonshire, Gwendoline! To Devonshire! Did he say to Devonshire?”

“Yes,” Gwendoline went on slowly, trying to recall his very words. “To the skirts of Dartmoor, I think he said; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”

“Mambury!”

The terror and horror that frail and faded woman threw into the one word fairly startled Gwendoline. She opened her eyes and stared aghast at her mother. And well she might, for the effect was electrical. Mrs. Gildersleeve was sitting there, transfixed with awe and some unspeakable alarm; her figure was rigid; her face was dead white; her mouth was drawn down with a convulsive twitch; she clasped her bloodless hands on her knees in mute agony. For a moment she sat there like a statue of flesh. Then, as sense and feeling came back to her by slow degrees, she could but rock her body up and down in her chair with a short swaying motion, and mutter over and over again to h............