Geoffrey does not hear her. Paul does. And as his own name, coming from her lips, falls upon his ear, a great change passes over his face. It is ashy pale; his lips are bloodless; his eyes are full of rage and undying hatred: but at her voice it softens, and something that is quite indescribable, but is perhaps pain and grief and tenderness and despair combined, comes into it. Her lips—the purest and sweetest under heaven—have deigned to address him as one not altogether outside the pale of friendship,—of common fellowship. In her own divine charity and tenderness she can see good in others who are not (as he acknowledges to himself with terrible remorse) worthy to touch the very hem of her white skirts.
"Go," she says, again, entreatingly, still with her hand on Geoffrey's breast, as though to keep him back, but with her eyes on Paul.
It is a command. With a last lingering glance at the woman who has enthralled him, he steps out through the window on to the balcony, and in another moment is lost to sight.
Mona, with a beating heart, but with a courage that gives calmness to her outward actions, closes the window, draws the shutters together, bars them, and then goes back to Geoffrey, who has not moved since Rodney's departure.
"Tell me again how it all happened," he says, laying his hands on her shoulders. And then she goes through it again, slowly, carefully.
"He was standing just there," she says, pointing to the spot where first she had seen Paul when she entered the library, "with his face turned to the panels, and his hand up like this," suiting the action to the word. "When I came in, he turned abruptly. Can he be eccentric?—odd? Sometimes I have thought that——"
"No; eccentricity is farther from him than villainy. But, my darling, what a terrible ordeal for you to come in and find him here! Enough to frighten you to death, if you were any one but my own brave girl."
"The dogs gave me courage. And was it not well I did bring them? How strange that I should have wished for them so strongly to-night! That time when he drew out the dagger!—my heart failed me then, and but for Spice what would have been the end of it?" She shudders. "And yet," she says, with sudden passion, "even then I knew what I should have done. I had his pistol. I myself would have shot him, if the worst came to the worst. Oh, to think that that man may yet reign here in this dear old house, and supplant Nicholas!"
Her eyes fill with tears.
"He may not,—there is a faint chance,—but of course the title is gone, as he has proved his birth beyond dispute."