Lady Sarah drew herself up.
“What is the divinity that hedges Miss Pembury,” she asked haughtily, “that she must be considered incapable of any sort of error?”
He stopped and answered her steadily.
“She is a perfectly noble and irreproachable lady,” he said, “and as incapable of a mean and despicable theft as you are yourself.”
His wife looked down, with the blood rising in her cheeks.
“You will then be satisfied with her message. You won’t try to find out anything more?” she said in a low voice.
“I will say nothing to any one at present,” he said quietly. “I think, Sarah, you must be satisfied with that.”
She looked at him doubtfully, but affected to think that he had given her the promise she wanted; and then she kissed him and tripped out of the room.
But she left her husband in a state of acute distress. It was not possible for him to believe that his wife had deliberately deceived him, although even that sometimes seemed more likely than that the patient, high-minded Rhoda should have been guilty of deception and ingratitude.
But he felt sure that he had only heard part of the story, and the conclusion to which he still clung, after turning the matter over in his mind, was that Rhoda was shielding some one else. Who that some one was, however, he had no idea. And that it could be the man who had been dear to him for so many years, in conjunction with his own wife, who had robbed him, never for one moment entered the baronet’s mind.