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284 points I should like you to help me clear up, if you will.”

“I shall be glad to if I can,” she answered, and smiled at him, her eyes brimming again. “You’ve lifted such a load from me, Mr. Godfrey, that I’d do almost anything to show my gratitude.”

Why, looking at her, did his face change—soften, harden? Why did his hands tremble so? It was over in an instant; yet I had caught a glimpse of his secret, I understood…

“It was nothing,” he said; “I was glad to do it—I was deeply pleased when that message came this morning.”

“You’ve been kinder to me than I deserved,” she said; and I more than half agreed with her. How, with his eyes before her, could she fail to understand? Perhaps she did understand—I was never sure.

“In the first place, then, Miss Croydon,” he went on, in a different tone, “how did your father succeed in getting your sister away from Tremaine?”

“They had gone to Paris,” she answered, “and in two or three days, Edith had awakened from her dream—she saw something in the man which terrified her, and she wrote a pitiful letter to father, who went over to Paris at once, and finally succeeded in buying the man off. Father paid him fifty thousand francs, I believe—perhaps it was the fact that he knew he was not really Edith’s husband—that he himself had committed a crime—which made him take it. He agreed to leave the country, and in the following December he wrote father that he was about to sail for Martinique in a ship called the Centaur. He said