And in this game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part! _But why had she leaped into the sea ?_ It was as if a new voice had made itself heard in Alan's brain, a voice that rose insistently over a vast tumult of things, crying out against his arguments and demanding order and reason in place of the mad convictions that possessed him.

If Mary Standish's mission was to pave the way for his ruin, and if she was John Graham's agent sent for that purpose, what reason could she have had for so dramatically attempting to give the world the impression that she had ended her life at sea?
Surely such an act could in no way have been related with any plot which she might have had against him! In building up this structure of her defense he made no effort to sever her relationship with John Graham; that, he knew, was impossible.

The note, her actions, and many of the things she had said were links inevitably associating her with his enemy, but these same things, now that they came pressing one upon another in his memory, gave to their collusion a new significance.
Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John Graham, was working _against_ him?
Could some conflict between them have been the reason for her flight aboard the _Nome_, and was it because she discovered Rossland there--John Graham's most trusted servant--that she formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea?
Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he knew to be true settled upon him.

Mary Standish, even if she hated John Graham now, had at one time--and not very long ago--been an instrument of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of that.

What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of the matter.