“Is this yours, Mr Louvaine?” Her voice said, “Guilty or not guilty?” so plainly that he was almost ready to respond, “Of what?”
Aubrey gave the garnet solitaire a more prolonged examination than it needed. He felt no doubt of its identity.
“Yes, Madam, I think it is,” he answered slowly. “At the least, I have lost one that resembles it.”
“I think it is, too,” said the Countess no less sternly. “Do you know where this was found, Mr Louvaine?”
Aubrey began to feel thoroughly alarmed.
“No, Madam,” he faltered.
“In the chamber of Thomas Winter, the traitor and Papist, at the sign of the Duck, in the Strand. Perhaps you can tell me how it came thither?”
Aubrey was silent, from sheer terror. A gulf seemed to yawn before his feet, and the Countess appeared to him in the light of the minister of wrath waiting to push him into it. With the rapidity of lightning, his whole life seemed to pass in sudden review before him—his happy childhood and guarded youth at Selwick Hall, the changed circumstances of his London experiences, his foolish ways and extravagant expenditure, his friendship with Winter, the quiet home at the White Bear into which his fall would bring such disgrace and sorrow, the possible prison and scaffold as the close of all. Was it to end thus? He had meant so little ill, had done so little wrong. Yet how was he to convince any one that he had not meant the one, or even that he had not done the other?
In that moment, one circumstance of his early life stood out bright and vivid as if touched with a sunbeam:—an act of childish folly, done fifteen years before, for which his grandfather had made him learn the text, “Thou God seest me.” It came flashing back upon him now. Had God seen him all this while? Then He knew all his foolishness—ay, and his innocence as well. Could He—would He—help him in this emergency? Aubrey Louvaine had never left off the outward habit of saying prayers; but it was years since he had really prayed before that unheard cry went up in the gallery of Oxford House—“Lord, save me, for my grandmother’s sake!” He felt as if he dared not ask it for his own.
All these thoughts followed each other in so short a time that Lady Oxford was conscious of little more than a momentary hesitation, before Aubrey said—