CHAPTER IX.
The rumor had come to Margaret Ruysdale's ears at last, and she believed it. She could hardly have failed to believe it; the chain of circumstantial evidence, to which she could add some links from her own observation, was so strong and so damning. The summons which called Philip Rondelet from Mrs. Harden's dinner-table on the night which people still believed to have preceded the duel, the strange message that a lady was waiting for him in the carriage, his appearance the next day with his wounded arm in a sling, his melancholy, and the apathetic moods she had first known in him, which had now given place to a more hopeful and elastic frame of mind: these things all pointed conclusively to the fact at which people hinted,—that Fernand Thoron had fallen by the hand of Philip Rondelet. It was a great shock to Margaret; and for several days she shut herself from the world and refused to see any one. Then, as hers was one of those natures which instinctively turn to work for their consolation, she betook
