The Miranda who wrote the love-letter was Miranda Warriner, Ralph Warriner's wife. Miranda Bedlow she had been at the date which headed the letter. She was living now at Ronda in the Andalusian hills, a hundred miles from Algeciras and Gibraltar, and had lived there since her husband's disappearance. To Ronda the oilskin case was sent. She heard the news of her Ralph's death with a natural sense of solemnity, but she was too sincere a woman to assume a grief which she could not feel. For her married life had been one of extraordinary unhappiness.
CHAPTER II
[PRESENTS THE HERO IN THE UNHEROIC ATTITUDE OF A SPECTATOR]
It was Lady Donnisthorpe who two years later introduced Luke Charnock to Mrs. Warriner. Lady Donnisthorpe was an outspoken woman with an untameable passion for match-making, which she indulged with the ardour and, indeed, the results of an amateur chemist. Her life was spent in mingling incompatible elements and producing explosions to which her enthusiasm kept her deaf, even when they made a quite astonishing noise. For no experience of reverses could stale her satisfaction when she beheld an eligible bachelor or maid walk for the first time into her parlour.
She had made Charnock's acquaintance originally in Barbados. He sat next her at a dinner given by the Governor of the Island, and took her fancy with the pleasing inconsistency of a boyish appearance and a wealth of experiences. He was a man of a sunburnt aquiline face, which was lean but not haggard, grey and very steady eyes, and a lithe, tall figure, and though he conveyed an impression of activity, he was still a restful companion. Lady Donnisthorpe remarked in him a modern appreciation of the poetry of machinery, and after dinner made inquiries of the Governor.
"He is on his way homewards from Peru," answered the latter. "He has been surveying for a railway line there during the last two years. What do you think of him?"
"I want to know what you think."
"I like him. He is modest without diffidence, successful without notoriety."
"What are his people?" asked Lady Donnisthorpe.
"I don't believe he has any. But I believe his father was a clergyman in Yorkshire."