Deborah let him go at once, with an exclamation of relief.
“That’s all right!”
He had already got half out of the window, when suddenly he drew back and came to her. She was sitting by the table leaning her head on her hand.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Audaer,” said he, most contritely with the ring of sincere feeling in his voice, as he felt in the obscurity for her hand, which she gave him at once. It was cold and trembling. “My dear girl, I hope I have not hurt you—for heaven’s sake, tell me I have not!” he cried with much concern.
“No, you have not,” she answered in a hoarse and broken voice. “But I am beginning to feel what you feel—that some dreadful thing is going to happen—that that man’s presence brings harm.”
“Well, I choose to think that your presence counteracts it, for you are a good, brave girl. Now, child, I want you to wait here for me, and if Rees should come, use your influence with him. I am going to use mine with Amos.”
“You are—really?”
“Really. Good-bye for the present.”
Deborah was in so excited a state that even the haste with which he added those last three words, “for the present,” seemed to her portentous. She listened with straining ears to the last sound of his footsteps as he trod the uneven stones in the direction Amos had taken.
As in the case of most “presentiments,” Lord St. Austell’s vague foreboding was the result chiefly of very clear and distinct knowledge. He knew very well that his personator at the Tower on the previous day could be no other than Amos Goodhare, between whom and himself there had alway existed a dislike, all the stronger for having been most decently veiled. There was a likeness in the temperament and disposition of the two men as marked as their outward resemblance to each other, and this likeness accentuated their difference of social position, and so increased the mistrust of the one, and the hatred of the other. What treatment, then, could the earl hope to receive at the hands of a man who hated him, who had just proved himself to be an audacious and unprincipled scoundrel, and who held all the cards in his own hands. Lord St. Austell had not the least fear of personal violence; in his younger days he had proved a brave and a lucky soldier, and he would have felt reassured rather than alarmed if he had thought that the matter would be decided by any sort of physical encounter. What he feared was that Goodhare would absolutely refuse to come to terms, would stubbornly affect ignorance of the whole affair, in which case the career of his brother Charles, keeper of the regalia, would be ruined.