riot held his tongue about it next morning. He was
one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn't go. He said something
to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.'

'How betrayed him?' said I.

'Why,' said Temple, 'of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi's
hands. Edbury wouldn't have known of Mabel's sailing, or known the vessel
she was in, without her help. She led him down to the water and posted
him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh's; and when you and Captain
Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla. Old Heriot is not
responsible for the consequences. What he supposed was likely enough. He
thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair, and thought, I
suppose, that if Edbury saw her he'd find he couldn't leave her, and old
Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her plumes for nothing at
the altar. And so she did: and a pretty scene it was. She snatched at the
minutes as they slipped past twelve like fishes, and snarled at the
parson, and would have kept him standing till one P.M., if Janet had not
turned on her heel. The old woman got in front of her to block her way.
"Ah, Temple," she said to me, "it would be hard if I could not think I
had done all that was due to them." I didn't see her again till she was
starting for Germany. And, Richie, she thinks you can never forgive her.
She wrote me word that the princess is of another mind, but her own
opinion, she says, is based upon knowing you.'

'Good heaven! how little!' cried I.

Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet's behalf for
my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of pride
and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread my
unforgivingness. Yet he and Janet had known me longest. Supposing that my
idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that I thought
of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been through the
previous years? Did I judge by the flower, and they by root and stem? But
the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off: it may be a
different development next year. Did they not therefore judge me soundly?

Ottilia was the keenest reader. Ottilia had divined what could be wrought
out of me. I was still subject to the relapses of a not perfectly right
nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought of 'An odd series
of accidents!' which was but a disguised fashion of attributing to
Providen