The whole scene reproduced itself in his tired brain with the colours of life; Lord Sanquhar’s sardonic, pale, haughty face, the rich vividness, the unblessed allurement, the cruel beauty of the unfaithful wife; the Spaniard’s agony; the irredeemable tragedy of that picture of the father with the child; then the dead face.
“Heaven strike their bad hearts!” had cried Pamela in her honest revulsion. Could God ever forgive those who had sent forth the soul of their victim so charged with fury and despair that even death could bring no peace to his brow?
And then he thought of Pamela’s face as he had last seen it—pale, tear-stained, but with the old luminous innocence. And, after all, he thought, there had come good out of the evil.
“The providence of God is over us all,” he thought with gratitude, as he rose stiffly to seek that feather bed, where there was small likelihood of sleep that night for him.
He heard the call of a coach horn beyond, in the night, and immediately afterwards the mighty clatter of the four sets of hoofs and the rush of the wheels in the streets. He went to his window, opened it, and looked out.
The up coach from Dover, pausing only to drop a single passenger. Stay, to take up a passenger, too. Sir Everard recognised the swing of the shoulders, the tall, alert frame, the indefinable swagger, even though muffled in the many-caped travelling coat.
Young Bellairs was not going to Paris with a fair companion!
“Thank Heaven!” said Sir Everard.
CHAPTER V
In which Miss Pamela Pounce Demonstrates the
Value of Virtue to her Family and her Friends