ading for a favourable judgment, how everything that
happened had naturally hardened her heart and made her feel as if she
had been born an outcast. Lastly, she told how Sir Edmund Grosse had
pursued her mother with detectives, and, as she had for a time believed,
had pursued herself with the hypocritical appearance of friendship. She
had been wrong, it seemed now, in judging him so harshly, but it had
hurt terribly at the time.

Through all this Mark was struggling against the repulsion that
threatened to drown the sympathy he wanted to give her. But he had,
naturally, not the faintest suspicion as to what was coming or that
Molly was confiding in him a story of her own wrong-doing. He was
absolutely confounded when she went on, still in the tone of passionate
self-defence, to tell how she had found the will leaving the whole of
Sir David's fortune to Lady Rose. He simply stared at Molly when she
said:

"Who could suppose for a single moment that I should be obliged, on
account of a scrap of paper which was evidently sent to my mother for
her to dispose of as she liked, to become a pauper and to give a fortune
to Lady Rose Bright?"

But although he was too astounded for speech, and his face showed
strange, stern lines, it was now that there awoke in his heart the
passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most
pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the
woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome
temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to
save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it
entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into
crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen for his own portion.

"It's a hard, hard case," he murmured, to Molly's surprise.

She had been so occupied in her own outpouring that she had hardly
thought of him at first, except as a human outlet for her story made
safe by the fact that he was a priest. But when he had betrayed his
silent but most eloquent amazement, she had suddenly realised what the
effect of her confidences might be on such a man, and half expected
anathemas to thunder over her head.

Then he tried to find out whether there was any kind of hope that the
will had, in fact, been sent to her mother to be at her disposal. But
suddenly Molly, who had herself suggested this idea, rent it to pieces
and brought out the whole case against