"Gone!" she told him a little melodramatically. "Didn't you know that we had been alone ever since the morning afterwards? First of all, my almost fiancé, Charlie Grantham, drove off at dawn. He left behind him a little note. He had every confidence in me, but—he went. Then my aunt. She was the most peevish person I ever knew. She seemed to imagine that I had in some way interfered with her plans for your subjugation, and although she knew quite well that no woman of the Mandeleys family could ever stoop to any unworthy or undignified action, she decided to hurry her departure. She left at midday."
"But Miss Sylvia?"
"Sylvia was most ingenuous," Letitia continued, her voice regaining a little of its natural quality. "Sylvia came to me quite timidly and asked me to walk with her in the garden. She wondered—was it really settled between me and Lord Charles? If it was, she was quite willing to go into a nunnery or something equivalent,—Chiswick, I believe it was, with a maiden aunt. But if not, she believed—he had whispered a few things to her—he was hoping to see her that week in town. It was most extraordinary—-she couldn't understand it—but it seemed that their old flirtations—you knew, of course, that they had met often before—had left a void in his heart which only she could fill. He had discovered his mistake in time. She threw herself upon my mercy. She left by the three-thirty."
"My God!" he groaned. "And this was all my doing!"
"All your doing," she assented equably. "They were all of them perfectly content to accept your story. There is not one of them who disputes it for a single moment. But you were there, with the secret door closed behind you, and, as my aunt said, there is really no accounting for what people will do, nowadays. And now," she concluded, "I gather that you are leaving, too."
"I am motoring up to town to-morrow morning," he said. "I haven't ventured to speak of atonement, but your coming here like this, Lady Letitia, is the kindest thing you have ever done—you could ever do. I have tried, in my way," he went on, after a moment's pause, "to live what I suppose one calls a self-respecting life. I have never before been in a position when I have been ashamed of anything I have done. And now, since those few minutes, I have lived in a burning furnace of it. I daren't let my mind dwell upon it. Those few minutes were the most horrible, psychological tragedy which any man could face. If your coming really means," he went on, and his voice shook, and his eyes glowed as he leaned towards her, "that I may carry away with me the feeling that you have forgiven me, I can't tell you the difference it will make."
"But why go?" she asked him softly.
His heart began to beat with sudden, feverish throbs. His eyes searched her face hungrily. She seemed in earnest. Her lips had lost even their usual, faintly contemptuous curl. If anything, she was smiling at him.
"Why go?" he repeated. "Can't you understand that the one desire I have, the one burning desire, is to put myself as far away as possible from the sight and memory of what happened that night? We have been telephoning through to London. I have taken my passage for America on Saturday. I shall go straight out to the Rockies. I just want to get where I can forget your look and the words with which your father turned me out of his house. And worse than that," he added, with a little shake in his tone, "their justice—their cruel, abominable justice."
Then what was surely a miracle happened. She leaned forward and took his hand. Her eyes were soft with sympathy.