“Will you tell me now?”
“I cannot.”
She lifted a countenance like that of a dead person, staring wildly, blankly, before her.
“Then I know. It was Rees Pennant!”
Lord St. Austell was by no means a dull person when an important occasion arose for the exercise of his wits. He had been told where to find his daughter by a servant who knew better than to say what reason took her to Mrs. Walker’s, and until this moment he had not had the least suspicion of her attachment to Rees and her secret correspondence with him. But he had caught sight of a slight, well-formed figure he recognised behind the reed curtain, for neither Rees nor Lady Marion had remembered that a small lamp was burning at the back of the second room. In an instant the earl understood everything. Connecting Amos with the change in Rees, as he had already known how to connect him with the personation of himself at the Tower that day, he felt that he had now more than a clue, and therefore spoke with certainty.
Marion was in despair. She at once began a denial so energetic that Rees, perceiving that the game was up, stepped through the rustling reeds with a grand air.
“It is unnecessary to say more,” he said, standing in the centre of the room, conscious even at this moment of the effective picture he made. “I admit that the letters were given to me.”
The earl came to the point at once. What were these two, this knave and this fool, that he should spend time and words on them when the honor of his family was at stake?
“Then you know where the jewels are,” he said, still in a low voice, but with perceptibly rising excitement. “Put me in the way of finding them to-night, and you may marry my daughter to-morrow.”
Rees gave him a low bow.