"My Dear Everest,—Perhaps you can imagine with what profound sorrow I read your letter of yesterday. I am doubly wounded, as father and as clergyman.
"It is indeed deplorable that a girl like Regina, brought up so carefully, spiritually watched over so tenderly, grounded so thoroughly in religious principles and surrounded by the purity of a loving home, should have taken such a terrible and distressing step.
"You ask me to have confidence in you, and I think you know already, my dear Everest, I have the greatest confidence. But for this, the blow would be insupportable. You must, however, realise what a father's feelings are in such a terrible situation, and I trust you will exert yourself to the utmost to make my daughter's position an honourable one as soon as you possibly can. I cannot write more at present; I feel it all too keenly. In much sorrow, your old friend,
"John."
He read that over with satisfaction. He knew Everest would not stand the least coercion, but that to say he had confidence in him and, as it were, to put him on his honour, was the best—in fact the only—way to deal with him.
With a bland smile, he folded the letter, put it in its envelope and then turned to his sermon for next Sunday, on "Candour and Honesty."
When Everest received this letter he read it through, an amused smile playing over his handsome face, and then slipped it into his pocket, with the single comment: "Jolly old humbug, John!"
The first thing on Monday morning Regina begged him to see about getting her picture sold, and Everest sent it to a shop he knew well in Bond Street, with instructions to frame and glaze it, and expose it in the window.
Regina asked specially that the price might be put on, and fixed it without consulting anyone at seventy-five pounds.
Two or three days after, in Bond Street, they saw a little knot of people before a shop, and when they came up to it found it was "The Murderer" that made the attraction.
The painting looked very fine in its frame, and leaning back at just the right angle in the window. One could hardly pass it without at least a sideways glance, and nearly everyone paused to gaze at it.
Regina stood for a moment, hearing, with Everest beside her, the comments on her work. Outwardly, she was quite unmoved, but when they turned into the park she looked up at him.
Her face was flushed and glowing, her eyes shone softly. "Thank you so much for arranging it all so well for me. I shall be glad when it is sold. It is not a picture one wants to keep, as one does 'The Enchanted Garden,'" and then after a pause: "All those people to-day spoke of its great power, didn't they? It was fun to hear them talk!"