“You torture me!” cried Gabriel, desperately.
“Oh, you pretend that you are unchanged,” said Hilary, with scorn. “But there is no smoke without fire, and the Gloucestershire heiress——”
“Hush!” he said, sitting down beside her once more, and his quietness of manner and restrained force dominated her.
“Now I am resolved that you shall hear precisely what passed, for it is due to Mistress Neal as well as to you and to myself.”
Very briefly he told of Norton’s interview with Major Locke at Gloucester, of the interrupted duel, of the way in which he and Joscelyn Heyworth had rescued Helena from the cruel trap that had been set for her. In spite of herself Hilary’s sympathies were enlisted on the side of the poor little maid, and perhaps she inclined to her all the more when she heard that she was now happily married to Mr. Humphrey Neal.
“And her father?” she inquired. “What has become of him?”
“He died at Marlborough, mainly, I do believe, because Colonel Norton forced him to travel when he was desperately wounded and refused him the aid of a surgeon,” said Gabriel.
There was a silence. He would not speak of the way in which Norton had treated him in the church.
“After all,” said Hilary, with a mutinous little toss of the head, “I have but your word for this. You tell me one tale and Colonel Norton another. Why should I trust a rebel and distrust a Royalist?”
A sigh of despair broke from Gabriel at her perversity.