In the meantime telegrams at a very great cost had been flying backwards and forwards between Cambridge and Sydney.

William and Robert Bolton had determined among them that, at whatever expense to the family, the truth must be ascertained; and to this the old banker had assented.

So far they were right, no doubt.

If the daughter and sister was not in truth a wife,--if by grossest, by most cruel ill-usage she had been lured to a ruin for which there could be no remedy in this world,--it would be better that the fact should be known at once, so that her life might be pure though it could never again be bright.

But it was strange that, with all these Boltons, there was a desire, an anxiety, to prove the man's guilt rather than his innocence.