“Afternoon’s shopping! Why, she had nothing to buy but a few veils and gloves, that I could have bought in half an hour,” cried Lady Jennings impatiently, thus confirming his own doubts as to Rachel’s account of her occupation that afternoon. “And where did she go to when you left her?”
Gerard was nonplussed for a moment. He could not say that he had thought she was coming straight home, as that would certainly put Rachel herself into an awkward position when she did make her appearance. So he said—
“I understood that she was coming here, but I think she may have missed her cloak and gone back for it to the shops she had been to.”
This was a good suggestion, and for the time Lady Jennings was partly appeased. She turned to Lilian, heard almost without listening the girl’s account of the reason of her visit, and then suggested that they should all go down to dinner together.
But Gerard excused himself, and took his leave.
He knew that there was trouble ahead; that this mysterious visit to the schoolgirl sister on the part of the white-haired gentleman who would not give his name, could only mean disaster for Rachel.
He was torn with anxiety on her account, and, forgetting his disgust, his doubts, his fears, he set about contriving some way of helping her to escape from the difficulties which threatened her.
He excused his eagerness in this perhaps questionable work, by telling himself that he did not, after all, know anything against her, that all his suspicions were mere surmise. But the very fact that he feared arrest for her betrayed his real belief, and he himself felt ashamed that he was so eager on her behalf.
More and more startling, as he knew her better, had grown the difference between her character as unfolded in her confidential talk, and the avocations of which he more than suspected her. She spoke and looked like a woman of the highest honor, the strongest sense of right and duty; and yet on every side he met with circumstances which seemed to point to her being engaged in crime!
One hope, and only one, remained to him; this was that she could be proved to be acting under an impulse so irresistible that what she did was no longer to be called crime at all, but irresponsibility. But though he had frequently heard the plea put forward on behalf of this or that woman afflicted in a similar manner, it was not surprising that, in spite of himself, he shrank from accepting, fully and straightforwardly, this explanation of the conduct of the woman whom, in the face of every doubt, he felt that he still loved.