ding his teeth--"I'll
write to him!" It was the tone in which he might have said, "I'll wring
his neck for him!"

But when Mary came round and perceived his mood and intentions, she
implored him not to write--went on her knees, and almost shrieked in
her frantic fear of his doing so.

"Oh, father, don't--DON'T! If he does not remember--if he does not want
to come--you would not drag him by force? And he never bound
himself--he never really asked me; very likely he did not mean
anything, after all."

"Not mean anything!" shouted the indignant father. "He can kiss a
girl--a daughter of mine--and not mean anything! I'll make him tell me
whether he dared not to mean anything--"

"No, father," commanded Deb. "You must not write to him. It is not for
a Pennycuick to fling herself at any man's head. Let him alone; we
don't want him. Treat him--as I hope Molly is going to do--with the
contempt that he deserves."

Mr Pennycuick stormed and muttered, but obeyed; and for two days
Captain Carey was left to the anathemas of Redford and the countryside
as a heartless jilt, to Mary's extreme anguish. She tried to water down
the concoction that she stood answerable for, to take blame off him and
put it on herself; but she dared not go far enough to convince anybody
that she was not sacrificing herself to shield him.

It was a horrible position for a delicate-minded and even high-minded
girl, and the misery of it was aggravated by the constant effort to
efface its signs and evidences. She was left with no outlook in life
but to get through twenty, thirty, forty years somehow, and come to a
little peace at last, when everything would be forgotten; and her one
forlorn hope was that Guthrie would not discover her crime--would keep
up the neglect with which he had treated his old friends, and not come
near them.

He might have done this--for the fact was that he now had a dawning
"affair" in another quarter--had not Frances intervened. To her,
inaction at such a crisis was intolerable, and since nobody else would
do it, she wrote to Guthrie Carey herself. She wrote, she said, to
welcome him back to life and to Australia, and to congratulate him on
being a captain; incidentally she mentioned other matters, and asked
innocent-seeming questions which she was well aware could only be
answered in person.

Frances, since his first acquaintance with her, had shot up into a
slim, tall girl, exquisite in colouring and the daintiness of he