“I promised you just now that you should not be exposed; but you must write a few words of confession to my father; and be quick about it, for I want to catch the express to London.”
Darnell, who was still pale and agitated, seized pen and paper, and wrote a few words of apology and a clear confession. To write was hard, but he was in such terror lest his employers should return and discover his miserable secret that he dared not hesitate—dared not beat about the bush.
Roy watched him with some curiosity, wondering now that he had not suspected the man sooner. But, as a matter of fact, Darnell had been perfectly self-possessed until his guilt was discovered; it was the exposure that filled him with shame and confusion, not the actual dishonesty.
“I don’t know how to thank you enough, sir, for your leniency,” he said, when he had written, in as few words as possible, the statement of the facts.
“Well, just let the affair be a lesson to you,” said Roy. “There’s a great deal said about drunkenness being the national sin, but I believe it is betting that is at the root of half the evils of the day. Fortunately, things are now set straight as far as may be, yet remember that you have wronged and perhaps irrevocably injured a perfectly innocent man.”
“I bitterly regret it, sir; I do, indeed,” said Darnell.
“I hope you do,” said Roy; “I am sure you ought to.”
And while Darnell still reiterated thanks, and apologies, and abject regrets, Roy stalked out of the shop and made his way back to the station.
“To think that I believed in that cur, and doubted Falck!” he said to himself with disgust. “And yet, could any one have seemed more respectable than Darnell? more thoroughly trustworthy? And how could I disbelieve the evidence that was so dead against Frithiof? Sigrid and Cecil trusted him, and I ought to have done so too, I suppose; but women seem to me to have a faculty for that sort of thing which we are quite without.”
Then, after a time, he remembered that the last barrier that parted him from Sigrid was broken down; and it was just as well that he had the railway carriage to himself, for he began to sing so jubilantly that the people in the next compartment took him for a school-boy returning for his Christmas holidays.