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Mr. Ratcliff came next morning, and had very little to say beyond an endorsement of the wisdom of Aunt Sophia’s point of view: if this Mr. St. Croix were really Lord Trent, he would not have disappeared so abruptly. There was no need at all for Lady Trent to feel disturbed. Enquiries should be made, of course, but no one need treat the matter seriously. Anyone with claims which could be proved would turn up again to repeat his story in the proper quarter, but such an event was improbable in the extreme.

Aunt Sophia was jubilant until she saw how little impression the lawyer’s remarks had made on Pamela. The child seemed bewitched. For two days she stayed, for the most part, in her own room, obstinately refusing to receive visitors or to fulfil her engagements. Very little colour had come back to her smooth cheeks, and she ate next to nothing. The poor child was face to face with a real difficulty for the first time in her life. With all her strength of will she was trying to realise what it actually meant, this knowledge that she was not, and never had been, Lady Trent. What was she to do with her life now? She was practically penniless—she who sat in this luxurious room, in a frock which she vaguely knew had been very expensive and the house did not belong to her—nor Trent Stoke—nor The Springs—she had nothing at all, for most of her father’s extremely small fortune had gone to a sister in South Africa, since his only child was so amply provided for—she was Pamela Learmonth, and everyone wanted her to go on living as if she were Lady Trent.

She writhed at the thought of her happy years at Trent Stoke. It was his money she had spent—his houses she had lived in—she had even used his name. She wrung her little hands. How was she to bear the shame of it? And no one understood; no one believed what she knew to be true. It was not the fact that it was Tony whose place she had usurped, whose money she had freely spent,