o out to the wicked old woman, and how her poor
little advance had been rejected.

Edmund had thought it one of the advantages of the expedition on the
yacht that it would make it impossible for many weeks to call again at
Molly's flat. He had often before felt uncomfortable and annoyed with
himself when he had been too friendly with Molly. Not that he felt her
attraction to be a temptation to disloyalty to Rose. He knew he was
incurable in his devotion to his love. But he did feel it mean to enjoy
this pleasant, philosopher-and-guide attitude, towards the daughter of
Madame Danterre. That Molly could hold any delusion about his feelings
had never dawned on his imagination as a possibility until the night
when she confided in him her forlorn attempt at doing a daughter's duty.
He had never liked her so well; never so entirely dissociated her from
her mother, and from all possibilities of evil.

And now the situation was changed; now there was this hazy mass of
suspicion revealed in Florence, and this most detestable story of
Larrone and the box.

How differently things looked when it was a question of suspecting of a
crime the woman he had seen in the Florentine garden, and of that same
suspicion regarding poor little graceful, original, Molly Dexter!

Within two or three days Edmund became still more immersed in business.
He began to realise his own ignorance as to his own affairs, and he went
through the slow torture of understanding how blindly he had left
everything in his solicitor's hands. He was beginning to face actual
poverty as inevitable, when he heard from Mr. Murray that Madame
Danterre's will was proved in London, and that her daughter was her sole
heir.

"The income cannot be less than L20,000 a year, and the whole fortune is
entirely at Miss Dexter's disposal," wrote Mr. Murray without any
comment whatever.

Edmund was not sorry that Rose and her mother were staying on in Paris.
They would escape the first outburst of gossip as to the further
history of Sir David Bright's fortune. Nor was he sorry that they should
also miss the growing rumours as to the disappearance of the fortune of
Sir Edmund Grosse. Of Rose herself he dared not let himself think; but
every evil conclusion which he had to face as to his own future, every
undoubted loss that was discovered in the inquiry which was being
carried on, seemed as a heavy door shut between him and the hopes of
those last days on the yacht.

CH