t you
write it?"

"The written word is not always effectual," the other man said.

He put up a hand abruptly and stripped the ragged hair from his face,
pushing back the heavy folds of the _chuddah_ that enveloped his head as
he did so. His features gleamed in the moonlight, lean and brown,
unmistakably British.

"Monck!" said Dacre, in the tone of one verifying a suspicion.

"Yes--Monck." Grimly the other repeated the name. "I've had considerable
trouble in following you here. I shouldn't have taken it if I hadn't had
a very urgent reason."

"Well, what the devil is it?" Dacre spoke with the exasperation of a man
who knows himself to be at a disadvantage. "If you want to know my
opinion, I regard such conduct as damned intrusive at such a time. But
if you've any decent excuse let's hear it!"

He had never adopted that tone to Monck before, but he had been rudely
jolted out of his usually complacent attitude, and he resented Monck's
presence. Moreover, an unpleasant sense of inferiority had begun to make
itself felt. There was something judicial about Monck--something
inexorable and condemnatory--something that aroused in him every
instinct of self-defence.

But Monck met his blustering demand with the utmost calm. It was as if
he held him in a grip of iron intention from which no struggles, however
desperate, could set him free.

He took an envelope from the folds of his ragged raiment. "I believe you
have heard me speak of my brother Bernard," he said, "chaplain of
Charthurst Prison."

Dacre nodded. "The fellow who writes to you every month. Well? What of
him?"

Monck's steady fingers detached and unfolded a letter. "You had better
read for yourself," he said, and held it out.

But curiously Dacre hung back as if unwilling to touch it.

"Can't you tell me what all the fuss is about?" he said irritably.

Monck's hand remained inflexibly extended. He spoke, a jarring note in
his voice. "Oh yes, I can tell you. But you had better see for yourself
too. It concerns you very nearly. It was written in Charthurst Prison
nearly six weeks ago, where a woman who calls herself your wife is
undergoing a term of imprisonment for forgery."

"Damnation!" Ralph Dacre actually staggered as if he had received a blow
between the eyes. But almost in the next moment he recovered himself,
and uttered a quivering laugh. "Man alive! You are not fool enough to
believe such a cock-and-bull story as that!" he said. "And you hav