‘If our mother had been like them, you might not have been such a senseless monster,’ said Herbert, pausing for a word. ‘Come, now; tell me what you have done with him, or I shall have to set on the police.’
‘Oh, Herbert, how can you be so cruel?’
‘It is not I that am cruel! Come, speak out! Did you bribe her with your teapot? Ah! I see: what has she done with him?’
He gripped her arm almost as he used to torture
her when they were children, and insisted again that either she must tell him the whole truth or he should set the police on the track.
‘You wouldn’t,’ she said, awed. ‘Think of the exposure and of mother!’
‘I can think of nothing but saving Mite! I say—my mother knows nothing of this?’
‘Oh no, no!’
Herbert breathed more freely, but he was firm, and seemed suddenly to have grown out of boyishness into manly determination, and gradually he extracted the whole story from her. He would not listen to the delusion in which she had worked herself into believing, founded upon the negations for which she had sedulously avoided seeking positive refutation, and which had been bolstered up by her imagination and wishes, working on the unsubstantial precedents of novels. She had brought herself absolutely to believe in the imposture, and at a moment when her uncle’s condition seemed absolutely to place within her grasp the coronet for Herbert, with all possibilities for herself.
Then came the idea of Louisa Hall, inspired by seeing her speak to little Michael on the beach, and obtain his pretty smiles and exclamation of ‘Lou, Lou! mine Lou!’ for he had certainly liked this girl better than Ellen, who was wanting in life and animation. Ida knew that Sam Jones, alias Rattler, was going out to join his brother in Canada, and that Louisa was vehemently desirous to accompany him, but had failed to satisfy the requirements of Government as to character, so as to obtain a free passage, and was therefore about to be left behind