st be faced somehow.
I feel rather badly hit; you won't mind if I go out and walk about a
little?"

Mrs. Lansing was glad to let him go; the sight of his hard-set face
hurt her. In another minute he was walking up and down the terrace,
but he stopped presently and leaned on the low wall. Hitherto he had
believed in Sylvia with an unshaken faith, but now a flood of suspicion
poured in on him; above all, there was the telling fact that as soon as
he had gone, she had begun to lead on his rival. The shock he had
suffered had brought George illumination. Sylvia could never have had
an atom of affection for him; she had merely made his loyalty serve her
turn. She had done so even before she married Dick Marston; though he
had somehow retained his confidence in her then. He had been a fool
from the beginning!

The intense bitterness of which he was conscious was wholly new to him,
but it was comprehensible. Just in all his dealings, he expected
honesty from others, and, though generous in many ways, he had not
Bland's tolerant nature; he looked for more than the latter and had
less charity. There was a vein of hardness in the man who had loved
Sylvia largely because he believed in her. Trickery and falseness were
abhorrent to him, and now the woman he had worshiped stood revealed in
her deterrent reality.

After a while he pulled himself together, and, going back to the house,
entered Herbert's library where, less because of his interest in the
matter than as a relief from painful thoughts, he opened the envelope
given him and took out the statement. For a few moments the figures
puzzled him, and then he broke into a bitter laugh. The money that he
had entrusted to his cousin's care had melted away.

During the next two or three minutes he leaned back, motionless, in his
chair; then he took up a pencil and lighted a cigar. Since he was
ruined, he might as well ascertain how it had happened, and two facts
became obvious from his study of the document: Herbert had sold sound
securities, and had mortgaged land; and then placed the proceeds in
rubber shares. This was perhaps permissible, but it did not explain
what had induced an astute business man to hold the shares until they
had fallen to their remarkably low value. There was a mystery here,
and George in his present mood was keenly suspicious. He had no doubt
that Herbert had left the statement because it would save him the
unpleasantness of giving a pers