lly white, awfully calm, he sat like a man of stone,
awaiting to hear what would cost him his life.

"Who was she?" the lawyer repeated.

Sybilla turned toward him and answered, in a voice plainly audible the
length and breadth of the, long room:

"She called herself Mrs. Denover. Mr. Parmalee called her his sister.
Both were false. She was Captain Harold Hunsden's divorced wife, Lady
Kingsland's mother, and a lost, degraded outcast!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

FOUND GUILTY.

There was the silence of death. Men looked blankly in each other's
faces, then at the prisoner. With an awfully corpse-like face, and
wild, dilated eyes, he sat staring at the witness--struck dumb.

The silence was broken by the lawyer.

"This is a very extraordinary statement, Miss Silver," he said. "Are
you quite certain of its truth? It is an understood thing that the
late Captain Hunsden was a widower."

"He was nothing of the sort. It suited his purpose to be thought so.
Captain Hunsden was a very proud man. It is scarcely likely he would
announce his bitter shame to the world."

"And his daughter was cognizant of these facts?"

"Only from the night of her father's death. On that night he revealed
to her the truth, under a solemn oath of secrecy. Previous to that she
had believed her mother dead. That death-bed oath was the cause of all
the trouble between Sir Everard and his wife. Lady Kingsland would
have died rather than break it."

She glanced again--swift, keen, sidelong, a glance of diabolical
triumph--at the prisoner. But he did not see it, he only heard the
words--the words that seemed burning to the core of his heart.

This, then, was the secret, and the wife he had loved and doubted and
scorned had been true to him as truth itself; and now he knew her worth
and purity and high honor when it was too late.

"How came Mr. Parmalee to be possessed of the secret? Was he a
relative?"

"No. He learned the story by the merest accident. He left New York
for England in his professional capacity as photographic artist, on
speculation. On board the steamer was a woman--a steerage
passenger--poor, ill, friendless, and alone. He had a kindly heart, it
appears, under his passion for money-making, and when this woman--this
Mrs. Denover--fell ill, he nursed her as a son might. One night, when
she thought herself dying, she called him to her bedside and told him
her story."

Clear and sweet Sybilla Silver's voice ran