serpent entered, and the ruin came with sin!'

Humphrey Ratcliffe liked to watch Mary's face as she spoke; but, as he left her, a few minutes later, he felt there was something which divided them and made his suit hopeless. What was it?

He knew but little of the history of her short married life. Her suitor had come in the train of the Earl of Leicester in one of his visits to Penshurst.

That she had been cruelly deceived was known, and that she had come back to her old home of Ford Manor with her child, clad in the weeds of widowhood, but saying nothing of what had really happened. Rumour had been busy, and Ambrose Gifford had been supposed to have been slain in a disgraceful fight; but nothing was absolutely certain; and Humphrey Ratcliffe, who had known Mary from her girlhood, now discovered that he had loved her always, and that he had failed to win her in her early youth because he had never tried to do so, and now that he loved her passionately, he was to find his suit was hopeless.

Perhaps it was the similarity between his own case and that of his master's that made the tie between them stronger than is often the case between an esquire and his chief.

CHAPTER III

A STRANGE MEETING