"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly.
"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded.
She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance.
"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."
He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.
A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.
"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"
She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."
"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"
Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to—I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. It was more than half their fault—they are so—so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me——"