"And then," the last letter went on, "oh! my God, then, Ariadne, when I had been Lord Glastonbury's wife for six months, we learnt that the man I had loved was innocent, and that he was the tool of a designing villain. We learnt it through a letter written to my husband by a woman who had been the friend of that villain and was cognizant of the robbery he was meditating; by a woman who, discarded and cast off, had found means to communicate with Glastonbury, she imagining that the theft had succeeded. And, darling," the unhappy writer concluded, "my husband, though dissolute, is an honourable man; if he could find my unhappy lover he would tell him all, he would send him that woman's letter. It might yet go far to restore him to his proper place in the world. Meanwhile, he intends to write to the Lords of the Admiralty."
Geoffrey called Ariadne to him when he had finished the perusal of the letters, and told her that he had done so; then he said quietly--
"It was a pity Lady Glastonbury never mentioned her lover's name to you. By chance (since I have spoken of him so much of late) we should have been able to help him. Now, it is too late."
"Geoffrey!" she exclaimed, after a moment's meditation, "let me see him. Perhaps--perhaps--if I let him hear those letters read it might do much to reclaim him, low as he has fallen, and horrible as is the calling he follows."
"Yet the calling which I profit by," her husband made answer. "Therefore is he little worse, if any, than we who employ him. But," he continued, "what use in seeing him, Ariadne? What can you do?"
"If I told him all that Sophy has written; if I should plead with him to lead a better life--now that he has exacted so horrible a vengeance on the man who destroyed him--might I not prevail?"
"Prevail! What is there for him to do?"
"God knows! Yet something better than that which he does now. Surely! surely!"
For a moment Geoffrey stood reflecting. He was profoundly impressed by all that he had learnt, as it was most natural he should be. Had not he himself sat upon the very court-martial which condemned Lewis Granger to ignominy; had not all upon that awful tribunal regarded him as a common knave; had not all refused to listen to his protestations of innocence? Yet now--now!--he was innocent. Everything proved it. Not only the letters of his lost love, but surely, also, the terrible retribution he had exacted from him who had so ruined him. If--if by a pure, good woman's pleading he could be induced to lead a better and more honourable calling, should he stand in the way of helping him to do so, even though that woman was his own wife?
Later that day, as Geoffrey inspected some men who had been brought off from the shore--they having been taken by a press-gang overnight after a hard fight--a boat came away from the stairs with, seated in it, Lewis Granger. He had come in answer to a summons from Geoffrey, in which the latter simply said that he wished to speak to him in connection with something in his past life in which they had both played a part. But he had added at the foot another line: "I wish to make you acquainted with Lady Barry."