“Oh, Amethyst, my darling Amethyst, I’ve ruined you; it’s all my fault, I did it! Tory says so, and it’s true, but if I don’t deny it and deny it, it will ruin him; Miss Verrequers will give him up. Oh, I can’t spoil his prospects. Oh, what shall I do?” Amethyst started up. There stood Una, with a very white face and black-ringed eyes, looking, in her ordinary striped frock and long hanging hair, as unlike her sister as could well be.
“You!” exclaimed Amethyst. “What do you mean? What can you mean, Una?”
“I mean, he kissed me. It was good-bye for ever and ever—and ever—there in the ante-room; Mrs Leigh must have seen me. Tory guessed directly, and of course she’ll tell. But, if I won’t own to it, they can’t bring it home to him. But you—oh, my darling! Oh, what shall I do?”
That the children should be mixed up in the miserable story seemed the last drop in Amethyst’s cup. But the sense that, helpless as she was, she was less helpless than Una, did rouse her to some power of consideration.
“I don’t think they could mistake you for me,” she said vaguely.
“I was all white, and my frock was long. Some one did think I was Miss Haredale. Amethyst, I think I could do it this way. If they think he had an affair with you, that would be worse still for him. We’ll go all three of us to Mrs Leigh, and say, we’re very sorry there’s been a mistake, but Major Fowler always played with us, as my lady said, and that he just gave me a kiss for fun, to tease me, as I was dressed like a grown-up girl. She’ll think we’re forward little minxes, but she’ll never think more of a child like me. I can do the child well enough, if I like,” concluded Una with melancholy shrewdness.
“I wouldn’t have you do such a thing for the world!” exclaimed Amethyst, horrified. “Besides, Mrs Leigh wouldn’t believe you; and that is not all.”
“Oh no, I know there’s some awful scrape of my lady’s. But won’t she believe about the purse either?” said Una, to whom the scheme of exciting magnanimous confession had a certain miserable attraction.
“Una!” said Amethyst, “I’d rather never see Lucian again, than have you and Tory tell lies for my sake. Oh, it is all horrible—better a thousand times lose him, than know I was deceiving him!”
“Is that true?” said Una, in a tone of intense surprise, and, as she spoke, an awful wave of self-knowledge flooded Amethyst’s mind; and the nature within her, akin to the mother whom she had found out, akin to the very girl whose proposal was so shocking to her, rose up in all its strength of self-pleasing passion. Was it true? She, felt as if her own soul, and the soul of her young sister,—nay, Lucian’s soul too, might depend on her answer.