"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?"
"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."
And now the unhappy man was close at hand, his mind filled with wonder at the strange summons.
"To make me acquainted with his wife," he had whispered to himself a dozen times--nay! a hundred times, since receiving the message. "I! the exposed forger--the man driven out of the Navy for an ignoble crime--the crimp of to-day. And this in connection with something in my past, of which her husband knows as well as I! What does it mean?"