She drew her hand gently away. "Will I?" she whispered. "Will I, truly?"
He seized her hand a second time, "Yes—yes, you will. You're going to be so kind—so good—to me. You're going to let me have your trouble to think of instead of mine. I'm so tired of the ceaseless agony of mine. I didn't do anything, you know. 'Fore God, I didn't do anything. It was all a plot, and now they've ruined her life and mine. Perhaps it was a plot with you, too."
"No," she breathed. "With me it was a plan."
"Never mind the difference," he protested. "They say, you know, that I was in love with the mother. I wasn't. Really, I wasn't. But they told her and the engagement was broken. It was all the most horrible thing imaginable. You'll hear it on all sides.
"Of course no one would believe that story about you, but every one believes the one about me. They haven't ruined you, but they have ruined me. And then people think that Scotland should have helped me." He paused, quite pale, his voice shaking.
His hand had closed harder and harder on hers, and now he drew it nearer. When he had pressed it between both of his own for a long minute, he felt a painful point within his palm, and, freeing her, he looked. On her third finger sparkled a diamond cross.
It was a great, awkward thing to be attached to a ring, although lovely enough in itself. The cross had marked his flesh. He turned her hand and saw that the ring was shaped and carven like a crown—a crown with points.
"The cross and the crown?" he questioned then. "Your own design?"
"His mother's," she said, still with closed eyes. "If I had been his wife it would have been mine. But as I can never be his wife he gave it to me to wear—because I loved him."
"The man who backed out?" Carleigh asked.