“Was this your promise?” Betty exclaimed.
“Miss Delavie, to the best of my ability I have kept my promise. Your sister has never seen me, nor to her knowledge spoken with me.”
“These are riddles, young man,” said the Major sternly. “If all be not well with my innocent child, I shall know how to demand an account.”
“Sir,” said the youth: “I swear to you that she is the same innocent maiden as when she left you. Oh!” he added with a gesture of earnest entreaty, “blame me as you will, only trace her.”
“Sit down, and let us hear,” said Betty kindly, pushing a chair towards him and pouring out a glass of wine. He sank into the first, but waved aside the second, becoming however so pale that the Major sprang to hold the wine to his lips saying: “Drink, boy, I say!”
“Not unless you forgive me,” he replied in a hoarse, exhausted voice.
“Forgive! Of course, I forgive, if you have done no wrong by my child. I see, I see, ‘tis not wilfully. You have been hurt in her defence.”
“Not exactly,” he said: “I have much to tell,” but the words came slowly, and there was a dazed weariness about his eye that made Betty say, in spite of her anxiety—“You cannot till you have eaten and rested. If only one word to say where she is!”
“Oh! that I could! My hope was to find her here,” and he was choked by a great strangling sob, which his youthful manhood sought to restrain.
Betty perceived that he was far from being recovered from the injury he had suffered, and did her best to restrain her own and her father’s anxiety till she had persuaded him to swallow some of the excellent coffee which Nannerl always made at sight of a guest. To her father’s questions meantime, he had answered that he had broken his arm ten days ago, but he could not wait, he had posted down as soon as he could move.