Then Mrs.Costobell and he deliberately concocted a plot to ruin me--he, for the sake of his old animosity--you remember that I had also crossed his path in Egypt--she, because she feared I would speak to her husband.

On pretence of seeking my advice, she inveigled me at night into a deserted corner of the Club grounds at Hong Kong.

Lord Ventnor appeared, and as the upshot of their vile statements, which created an immediate uproar, I--well, Miss Deane, I nearly killed him." Iris vividly recalled the anguish he betrayed when this topic was inadvertently broached one day early in their acquaintance.

Now he was reciting his painful history with the air of a man far more concerned to be scrupulously accurate than aroused in his deepest passions by the memory of past wrongs.

What had happened in the interim to blunt these bygone sufferings?
Iris clasped her locket.