rust undertaken deliberately, but with an aim
very different from that which would appear. He perceived how men must
assume now, when the truth of Samoval's death became known as become
known it must--that he had deliberately fastened upon another his own
crime. The fine edifice of vengeance he had been so skilfully erecting
had toppled about his ears in obscene ruin, and he was a man not only
broken, but dishonoured. Let him proclaim the truth now and none would
believe it. Sylvia Armytage's mad and inexplicable self-accusation was a
final bar to that. Men of honour would scorn him, his friends would
turn from him in disgust, and Wellington, that great soldier whom he
worshipped, and whose esteem he valued above all possessions, would be
the first to cast him out. He would appear as a vulgar murderer who,
having failed by falsehood to fasten the guilt upon an innocent man,
sought now by falsehood still more damnable, at the cost of his wife's
honour, to offer some mitigation of his unspeakable offence.

Conceive this terrible position in which his justifiable jealousy--his
naturally vindictive rage--had so irretrievably ensnared him. He had
been so intent upon the administration of poetic justice, so intent
upon condignly punishing the false friend who had dishonoured him, upon
finding a balm for his lacerated soul in the spectacle of Tremayne's own
ignominy, that he had never paused to see whither all this might lead
him.

He had been a fool to have adopted these subtle, tortuous ways; a fool
not to have obeyed the earlier and honest impulse which had led him to
take that case of pistols from the drawer. And he was served as a fool
deserves to be served. His folly had recoiled upon him to destroy him.
Fool's mate had checked his perfidious vengeance at a blow.

Why had Sylvia Armytage discarded her honour to make of it a cloak
for the protection of Tremayne? Did she love Tremayne and take that
desperate way to save a life she accounted lost, or was it that she knew
the truth, and out of affection for Una had chosen to immolate herself?

Sir Terence was no psychologist. But he found it difficult to believe in
so much of self-sacrifice from a woman for a woman's sake, however
dear. Therefore he held to the first alternative. To confirm it came the
memory of Sylvia's words to him on the night of Tremayne's arrest. And
it was to such a man that she gave the priceless treasure of her love;
for such a man, and in such a