They brought Harry Pallant ashore, cold and lifeless, and carried him up in haste to the hotel. There the village doctor saw him at once, and detected a faint tremor of the heart. At the end of an hour the lungs began to act faintly of themselves, and the heart beat a little in some feeble fashion.

With care Harry Pallant came round, but it took a week or two before he was himself again, and Louie nursed[Pg 294] him meanwhile in fear and trembling, with breathless agony. She had one consolation—Harry loved her. In the long nights the whole truth dawned upon her, clear and certain. She saw how Harry had opened the letter, had jumped at once to the natural conclusion, and had tried to drown himself in order to release her. Oh, why had he not trusted her? Why had he not asked her? A woman naturally thinks like that; a man knows in his own soul that a man could never possibly do so.

She dared not tell him yet, for fear of a relapse. She could only wait and watch, and nurse him tenderly. And all the time she knew he distrusted her—knew he thought her a hypocrite and a traitor. For Harry\'s sake she had to bear it.

At last, one day, when he was getting very much stronger, and could sit up in a chair and look bitterly out at the sea, she said to him in a gentle voice, very tentatively, "Harry, Dora Ferrand and her husband have gone to spend the summer in Norway."

Harry groaned. "How do you know?" he asked. "Has Hugh written to you? What is it to us? Who told you about it?"

Louie bit her lip hard to keep back the tears. "Dora telegraphed to me herself," she answered softly. "She telegraphed to me as soon as ever"—she hesitated a moment—"as soon as ever she saw your answer to her in the Monitor."

Harry\'s face grew white with horror. "My answer to her!" he cried in a ghastly voice, not caring to ask at the moment how Louie came to know it was he who wrote the answers in the Young People\'s Monitor. "My answer to you, you mean, Louie. It was your letter—yours, not Dora\'s. You can\'t deceive me. I read it myself. My poor child, I saw your handwriting."

It was an awful thing that, in spite of all, he must have it out with her against his will; but he would not flinch[Pg 295] from it—he would settle it then and there, once and for ever. She had introduced it herself; she had brought it down upon her own head. He would not flinch from it. It was his duty to tell her.

Louie laid her hand upon his arm. He did not try to cast it off. "Harry," she said, imploringly, persuasively, "there is a terrible mistake here—a terrible misunderstanding. It was unavoidable; you could not possibly have thought otherwise. But oh, Harry, if you knew the suffering you have brought upon me, you would not speak so, darling—you would not speak so."

Harry turned towards her passionately and eagerly. "Then you didn\'t want me to die, Louie?" he cried in a hoarse voice. "You didn\'t really want to get rid of me?"

Louie withdrew her hand hastily as if she had been stung. "Harry," she gasped, as well as she was able, "you misunderstood that letter altogether. It was not mine—it was Dora Ferrand\'s. Dora wrote it, and I only copied it. If you will listen a minute I will tell you all, all about it."

Harry flung himself back half incredulously on his chair, but with a new-born hope lighting up in part the gloom of his recovered existence.

"I went over to Dora Ferrand\'s the day after the Ogilvies\' dance," Louie began tremulously, "and I found Dora sitting in her boudoir writing a letter. I walked up without being announced, and when Dora saw me she screamed a little, and then she grew as red as fire, and burst out crying, and tried to hide the letter she was writing. So I went up to her and began to soothe her, and asked her what it was, and wanted to read it. And Dora cried for a long time, and wouldn\'t tell me, and was dreadfully penitent, and said she was very, very miserable. So I said, \'Dora, is there anything wrong between............