She watched them walk across the lawn, Captain Langton pleading earnestly, Lady Darrell's face softening as she listened.
"I am too late!" cried the girl, in an agony of self-reproach. "All my humiliation is in vain; she will believe him and not me. I cannot save her now, but one word spoken in time might have done so."
Oh, the bitterness of the self-reproach that tortured her—the anguish of knowing that she could have prevented Lady Darrell's wrecking her whole life, yet had not done so! It was no wonder that she buried her face in her hands, weeping and praying as she had never wept and prayed in her life before.
"Elinor, look at me," said Captain Langton; "do I look like a thief and a would-be murderer?"
Out of Pauline's presence the handsome face had regained its usual careless, debonair expression.
She raised her eyes, and he saw in them the lingering doubt, the lingering fear.
"If all the world had turned against me," he said, "and had refused to believe in me, you, Elinor, my promised wife, ought to have had more faith."
She made no reply. There had been something in the energy of Pauline's manner that carried conviction with it; and the weak heart, the weak nature that had always relied upon others, could form no decision unaided.
"For argument sake, let us reverse the case. Say that some disappointed lover of yours came to tell to me that you had been discovered stealing; should I not have laughed? Why, Elinor, you must be blind not to see the truth; a child might discern it. The fact is that long ago I was foolish enough to believe myself in love with Miss Darrell; and she—well, honestly speaking, she is jealous. A gentleman does not like to refer to such things, but that is the simple truth. She is jealous, and would part us if she could; but she shall not. My beautiful Elinor is all my own, and no half-crazed, jealous girl shall come between us."