has
insulted most of them to their faces. A bit of gossip got about, and
instead of ignoring it he limped out on the war-path, cutting half the
Estate and damning the other half in heaps."

"But what was her stage name?"

Delavoye gave a grim laugh as he ushered me into the garden of many
memories. "You wouldn't know it, Gilly. You were never a great playgoer,
you see, and Mrs. Ricardo was anything but a great actress. But she's a
very great good sort, as you'll find out for yourself when you know her
better."

I could quite believe it even then--but I was not so sure after a day or
two with Uvo. I found him leading a lonely life, with Nettleton's old
Sarah to look after him. Miss Delavoye had been wooed and married while
my back was turned, and Mrs. Delavoye was on a long visit to the young
couple. Uvo, however, appeared to be enjoying his solitude rather than
otherwise; his health was better, he was plying his pen, things were
being taken by all kinds of periodicals. And yet I was uneasy about him.
Among many little changes, but more in this house than in most, the
subtlest change of all was in Uvo Delavoye himself.

He could not do enough for me; from the few survivors of his father's
best bins, to my breakfast served in bed by his own hands, nothing was
good enough for the fraud he made me feel. Yet we were not in touch as
we had been of old. I could have done with fewer deeds of unnecessary
kindness and more words of unguarded intimacy. He did not trust me as he
used. He had something or somebody on his mind; and I soon made up mine
that it was Mrs. Ricardo, but not from anything else he told me. He
never mentioned her name again. He did not tell me that, with a view to
a third road, the Estate had just purchased a fresh slice of the
delightful woodland behind Mulcaster Park; that in its depths was a
little old ruin, just after his heart, and that this ruin was also a
favourite haunt of Mrs. Ricardo's. I was left to make all these
discoveries for myself, on a morning when Uvo Delavoye was expressly
closeted at his desk.

It was, to be sure, my old Mr. Muskett who told me about the new land,
and invited me to explore it at my pleasure. On a warm morning it seemed
a better scheme than going alone upon the river, as Uvo had suggested. I
accordingly turned back with Mr. Muskett, who went on to speak of the
ruin, and in fact set me on my way to it while I was setting him to the
station. Ten minutes later, in a ta