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ocal newspaper which has dared to print one of them with dashes for the names. The landlord of the inn told me how to fill them up, and you will see I have done it. The beauteous maiden herself has vanished from the scene--as no doubt you know. Indeed you probably know all about it. However, as you are abroad, and not likely to see these local rags, and as no London paper will print these things, you may perhaps be interested in what I enclose. Alack, my dear Philip, for the saints! They seem not so very different from you and me."
* * * * *
The eagerness with which Philip had read the newspaper cutting enclosed in the letter was only equalled by the eagerness with which afterward he fell to meditating upon it; pursuing and ferreting out the truth, through a maze of personal recollection and inference.
Richard!--nonsense! He laughed, from a full throat. Not for one moment was Philip misled by Judith Sabin's mistake. He was a man of great natural shrewdness, blunted no doubt by riotous living; but there was enough of it left, aided by his recent forced contacts with his cousin Richard all turning on the subject of Hester, to keep him straight. So that without any demur at all he rejected the story as it stood.
But then, what was the fact behind it? Impossible that Judith Sabin's story should be all delusion! For whom did she mistake Richard?
Suddenly, as he sat brooding and smoking, a vision of Hester flashed upon him as she had stood laughing and pouting, beneath the full length picture of Neville Flood, which hung in the big hall of the Abbey. He had pointed it out to her on their way through the house--where she had peremptorily refused to linger--to the old garden behind.
He could hear his own question: "There!--aren't you exactly like him? Turn and look at yourself in the glass opposite. Oh, you needn't be offended! He was the handsome man of his day."
Of course! The truth jumped to the eyes, now that one was put in the way of seeing it. And on this decisive re