aelic, "you have picked up a fortune. It would
have saved me much tribulation, and yourself some extra work, if you had
happened to pick it up a month ago!"

He hurried to Olivia.

"My dear," he said, "I have come upon the oddest secret."

His daughter reddened to the roots of her hair, and fell to trembling
with inexplicable shame. He did not observe it.

"It is that you have got out of the grip of the gled. Yon person was an
even blacker villain than I guessed."

"Oh!" she said, apparently much relieved, "and is that your secret? I
have no wonder left in me for any new display of wickedness from Simon
MacTaggart."

"Listen," he said, and read her the damnatory document. She flushed, she
trembled, she well-nigh wept with shame; but "Oh!" she cried at the end,
"is he not the noble man?"

"The noble man!" cried Doom at such an irrelevant conclusion. "Are you
out of your wits, Olivia?"

She stammered an explanation. "I do not mean--I do not
mean--this--wretch that is exposed here, but Count Victor. He has known
it all along."

"H'm," said Doom. "I fancy he has. That was, like enough, the cause of
the duel. But I do not think it was noble at all that he should keep
silent upon a matter so closely affecting the happiness of your whole
life."

Olivia saw this too, when helped to it, and bit her lip. It was,
assuredly, not right that Count Victor, in the possession of such
secrets as this letter revealed, should allow her to throw herself away
on the villain there portrayed.

"He may have some reason we cannot guess," she said, and thought of one
that made her heart beat wildly.

"No reason but a Frenchman's would let me lose my daughter to a scamp
out of a pure punctilio. I can scarcely believe that he knew all that is
in this letter. And you, my dear, you never guessed any more than I that
these attacks under cover of night were the work of Simon MacTaggart."

"I must tell you the truth, father," said Olivia. "I have known it since
the second, and that it was that turned me. I learned from the button
that Count Victor picked up on the stair, for I recognised it as his. I
knew--I knew--and yet I wished to keep a doubt of it, I felt it so, and
still would not confess it to myself that the man I loved--the man
I thought I loved--was no better than a robber." "A robber indeed! I
thought the man bad; I never liked his eye and less his tongue, that was
ever too plausible. Praise God, my dear, that he's found out!