The captured men are filing out now in twos and threes, closely guarded. Suddenly Honor starts forward, she has caught sight of a face that, disfigured by blows as it is, she would know among a thousand, and her heart seems to cease beating with the shock.
The tall man marching past between two policemen looks at her for an instant, and then turns his head aside. It is the one thing too much for Honor. With a heart-broken cry that has a thrill of horror in it she falls forward at her cousin's feet.
"Confound the fellow!" he says to himself, as he lifts her gently in his arms, as if she had been a child. "If he had not held out, like the fool he is, she need never have known a word about it."
CHAPTER VI.
Kate Dundas's most bitter enemies cannot deny that she is a beautiful woman. Dangerous she may be—a modern Circe, many of whose admirers find their way to Kilmainham, but, above and before everything else, the woman is beautiful. But it is not her face nor her figure, lithe and lissom for all its ripe maturity, that so holds men's hearts in thrall. There is a charm about her, a curious magnetic power that is even more dangerous than her beauty.
"I would not care to see much of your Mrs. Dundas," an old squire once said, talking of her. "I never knew but one woman who had the same coaxing, fooling ways with her, and, begorra, sir, she was a demon in petticoats!"
But that was only the opinion of a blunt old farmer; Launce Blake knows her a great deal better, or thinks he does. In his own way he is almost as handsome as she is; a tall fair man, with eyes so dark a gray that they look black under their thick lashes and a smile as sweet as a woman's. But, as he sits in Mrs. Dundas's pretty room to-night, he is not smiling—he has come here from Colonel Frenche's, as his father guessed he would—he is looking very stern indeed, and "altogether unmanageable," as Kate Dundas says to herself. It is not the first time by many that she has seen him in this mood. Launce is not one of her humble adorers, and perhaps she likes him all the better on that account.
"I am sure I don't know why you should be so angry," she is saying, in her pretty soft voice, which has just a touch of the Devonshire accent in it. "The man is nothing to me; but since he brought a letter from the poor major's old friend, Major Cregan, I had to be civil to him. I couldn't—could I, now"—coaxingly—"send him back again?"
Launce listens gravely; it is quite a long speech for her to make—as a rule, her eyes, her slow sweet smiles, speak for her.
"That sounds very well—and it may be true, as far as it goes—but it is not all the truth."