“Yes, I did!” he retorted, almost savagely. “I told—who was it I told?” He put his hand to his brow. “I can’t remember; my brain’s in a whirl. But you see now—you must see that I am innocent. My mother, she will tell you.”
Lady Wyndover put out a trembling hand and touched him on the arm.
“Oh, forgive me, Norman!” she cried. “I said from the first that you could not have done it. Forgive me!” Then she uttered an exclamation. “Esmeralda! If she did not go with you, where is she?”
The question stunned him.
“Has—has she not gone back? She must have done,” he said.
“No—no, she has not. Trafford would have telegraphed me at once. He knows that I am dying of anxiety and terror. Oh, Norman, think of her! Alone in the world, and so—so wretched! Where is she?”
“Have you been looking for her?” he asked, pacing up and down.
“Trafford—” she began; but he seemed scarcely to hear her.
His brain was at work, and at work clearer than Trafford’s, for many reasons; Esmeralda was not all the world to him now; though he loved her as a sister is loved, and he could be calmer than Trafford.
“She can not be with any friends or she would have written; they would have written,” said Lady Wyndover. “Besides, that is impossible. They would not hide her from us; and there is no one she knows intimately enough—”