“He was quite right,” remarks Glory. “Give him my compliments, and tell him that I think him ever so clever, and hope you’ll bring him here when you return.” Then after a pause she looks up and asks Claude a question, with her bewitching little head held sideways towards him, for her admirer’s ardent gaze has somewhat disconcerted the little, golden-haired maiden.
“May I ask one thing more? You won’t mind telling me that, will you?”
“What is it?” responds Claude, who, to tell the truth, would have gone near breaking his promise with Williams if Glory had demanded him to do so.
“I want to know how you know that it was really Billy that you have found?”
“Well, because I’ve seen him. We both, in fact, mutually recognized each other, although, as I told you, it is about ten years since I saw Billy in England. He, moreover, showed me an old scar I remembered upon his leg. He looks in very poor condition, poor fellow.”
“Mr. Angland,” says Glory gravely, “I will try and find out why poor Dr. Dyesart’s boy was hunted from here. Papa says, as I told you, that Billy told one of the boys here that he had killed your uncle, and that Billy ran away when he found that the boy had told papa. But papa must have been mistaken. It is all part of some horrible plan of Lileth’s.” Then standing up, and giving her tiny right hand to Claude, who holds it as if it were a precious piece of fragile crockery, she continues in a pleading tone of voice:—
“You must not think papa had anything to do with that letter I got from Carlo either. Will you try, just for my sake, to believe that papa had nothing to do with driving away Billy and writing that letter? My papa is rough, and I know you think he’s cruel to the niggers,—so did I when I first came up here for a visit, but I didn’t notice it after a while. But he’s really very good at heart; he really is.”
Glory speaks very earnestly; but suddenly, as she remembers that her father was present when Miss Mundella bound her to secrecy about the photograph, her voice falters, and she hesitates whether she ought to tell Claude all or not. But Angland interrupts her thoughts by speaking.
“If your father was the worst fellow going, and had kicked me out of the house, instead of treating me very hospitably, as he has done, I would forgive him, and vote him first-class, because of his being your father. And now ‘good-bye’ till I return.”
Claude finds the dreaded moment of separation, now that it has at last arrived, harder even than he had anticipated. There is a curious lump in his throat that renders the farewell words difficult of expression.