“No,” said Sylvester.
“Lady Haredale tried to make me think it was one of the children!”
“Look here, Lucy,” said Sylvester suddenly, and using Lucian’s old school nickname, “the truth is your due; and, if you know the truth, you can give Miss Haredale a better chance of explaining herself. Two or three days ago I saw her post a letter to Major Fowler. It was in her writing—she dropped it, and I picked it up; she blushed, and was embarrassed. When I came upon them at Loseby in the shrubbery they were talking earnestly, and she did give him a packet. He went away and left her there, and she turned and saw me. Una came up to us in a minute, she did not tell her that she had been with Fowler.”
“That disposes of the ‘children’s present’,” interpolated Lucian bitterly.
“After that,” continued Sylvester, “as I sat with your mother in the conservatory, Miss Haredale came through it. She was alone, and looked hurried. Mrs Leigh got up to join her; we looked through into the ante-room, and saw—a parting embrace. Afterwards we met her walking with Fowler and Miss Verrequers. She was not the least embarrassed then. There’s something not explained—some secret. And even if some childish indiscretion, some folly permitted by her mother, customary perhaps among them, has—has hampered her, Lucian, I believe on my soul she is a pure and noble creature, and she loves you—as—as no man on earth can deserve to be loved.”
Sylvester splice with passionate earnestness, heedless of the chance of self-betrayal; but Lucian never thought of him at all.
“It is either true, or false—and so is she,” he said, with white lips.
“Suppose we go and talk it over with your mother,” said Sylvester, after a pause, in a lame and commonplace fashion.
“I must go back, and settle it,” said Lucian, taking up his hat.
They walked away through the sunny fields together, each as miserable as he well could be, Sylvester, tormented with pity and indignant pain, feeling that the innate, inherent beauty of Amethyst’s soul was written in her face. She was worth trusting. And then there swept over him the thought of her mother and her elder sister, and the sad conviction that all the possibilities of her most lovely face were not noble ones. “Yet I would trust her, I would risk it all,” Sylvester thought, with a pang that was like an inward sob, as he knew not whether he were weaker or wiser than the poor young fellow beside him, on whom the problem turned another face, and who could only feel that love however passionate, beauty however exquisite, must not be weighed in the balance with honour and truth.