Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John
Graham, was working _against_ him? Could some conflict between them have
been the reason for her flight aboard the _Nome_, and was it because she
discovered Rossland there--John Graham's most trusted servant--that she
formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea?
Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he
knew to be true settled upon him. Mary Standish, even if she hated John
Graham now, had at one time--and not very long ago--been an instrument
of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of
that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had
inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past
under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just
now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of
the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things
that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation of
this fear, with Graham's cleverest agent at her heels, that she had
appealed to him in his cabin, and, failing to win him to her assistance,
had taken the matter so dramatically into her own hands. And within that
same hour a nearly successful attempt had been made upon Rossland's
life.
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