“Bertrand! It isn’t true! Will he have you arrested? Shall you be——” She began to sob.
“No, no; it isn’t as bad as that. There’s not going to be any arrest if the police can help it. Any way, I don’t believe Sir Frank would let them arrest me. But I shall have to resign my post, I expect, and I may have to leave the country.”
She looked at me through her tears. “That will be almost as bad, won’t it?”
It was all I could do to keep from answering, “Not if you come with me.” But I could not take advantage of her like that.
“I shall always have my profession,” I said. “Sir Frank has confidence in me as a doctor, I know. But I didn’t mean to distress you like this. I shouldn’t have said anything to you about it, but Sir Frank is coming here to lunch to-day, and I was afraid he might find out something from you.”
“Surely you didn’t think that,” she protested. “You don’t think I should betray you. If you had killed that villain it would have been for my sake. And he deserved to be killed.”
My heart glowed within me. I spoke out.
“And I would have killed him if I had seen no other way. No, I didn’t think for a moment that you would give me away knowingly; but Tarleton is a past master in the art of sounding people and extracting information from them unawares. I only wanted to put you on your guard, lest you should think that you could trust him as a friend of mine.”
“I certainly thought he was. He looked so kind and good,” Violet said thoughtfully.
Perhaps I was a little irritated. “He impresses all women in that way,” I said with a touch of jealousy. “I could see that he admired you.”