“A friend who—nonsense, man! I must know! Who was it? The marquis?”
The man shook his head again.
“I’m pledged, my lord,” he said. “But it wasn’t the marquis—confound him!” he added, under his breath.
“Not the marquis? I know of no one else—stop!” His face went crimson. “The lady who was here”—he sprang forward and seized the man’s arm in a grip like that of a vice—“was it she?”
“I’m pledged, my lord. I’ve given my word. I have, indeed!”
Lord Cecil dropped his arm.
“You have answered,” he said, in a low voice, and the officer, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded ruefully and went out.
Lord Cecil paced up and down the room with the discharge in his hand. The excitement of the last twenty-four hours, the suspense respecting Doris, the arrest, and now this sudden release, added to his physical exhaustion, told upon him fearfully.
That he owed his escape from the disgrace of imprisonment to Lady Grace he could not doubt. Doris, on whose truth he would have staked his life, had jilted him; his uncle, the marquis, had, in his hour of trouble, disdainfully deserted him and cast him aside and this woman, whom he had regarded as a perfect type of worldliness, had come to his aid and freed him.
She had done more than that, for she had risked her reputation in her desire to show him her sympathy with him. She had done that which only one woman in a thousand would have dared to do: come to his room alone and unprotected.