'You are too hard on Ned altogether, Dorothy, a great deal too hard. He spent a month of his leave entirely in your service, and now because he could not disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes you turn against him.'
'I am obliged to him for the trouble he has taken, father, but that is not what I want at present. I want trust; and I thought that if any one would have given it to me fully it would have been Ned Hampton, and nothing would have made me doubt him.'
'Well, my dear,' her father said, dryly, 'you may think so now, but if you were to see him filling his pockets out of a bank till, I fancy for a moment your trust in him would waver. However, I will go down to Danvers.'
He returned at the end of twenty minutes.
'His advice is the same as that which, as I mentioned this afternoon, Levine gave when I told him of the circumstances, and which I have no doubt he will repeat when he has further thought the matter over, namely, that unless we can obtain some evidence to support your denial, we have no chance of obtaining a verdict if we go into court. Danvers says that, of course, to those who know you, the idea of your taking these diamonds is absolutely preposterous; still, as the jury will not know you, and the public who read the report will not know you, they can only go by the evidence. He says that trying to look at it as a stranger, his opinion would be that it was an extraordinary case, but that unless we believed thoroughly that you had not taken the things, we should never have taken so hopeless a case into court. Still, he thinks that the verdict of those who only look at the outside of things would be that the denial was almost worse than the act. Had it not been for the unfortunate rumours previously circulated, many people might be of opinion that it was a case of kleptomania, and that no woman in her senses would have thus openly carried the things away from a place where she was well known.'
'I see all that, father; the more I have thought it over, the more I feel that it is certain that every one will be against me.'
'Then in that case, Dorothy, why fight a battle we are certain to lose? From the money point of view alone, it would be better to pay this twenty-five hundred pounds than the twenty-five hundred pounds plus the costs on both sides, which we might put down roughly at another thousand. If we pay it now, the matter may never become public, for even if the scoundrel was malicious enough to try and get a rumour about it into one of these so-called society papers I should doubt whether he could do so. In the last case they got the report, no doubt, from some one in Scotland Yard, but no editor would be mad enough to risk an action for libel with tremendous damages merely on an anonymous report, or at best, a report given only on the authority of an impecunious hanger-on of the turf. It seems to me, therefore, that we should have everything to lose, and nothing to gain, by bringing the matter into court.'
'But the same thing may be done again, father; if they have succeeded so well now they are sure to try and repeat it.'
'We might take measures to prevent their doing that. The moment the thing is settled we will go down into the country, and when we return to town next season I will get a companion for you—some bright, sensible woman, who will not be half her time laid up with headaches, and who will always go with you whenever you go out; so that were such an attempt made again, you would be in a position to prove conclusively where you were at the time. Danvers suggested that if I pay the money to Gilliat I should do so with a written protest, to the effect that I was convinced that you had not been in his shop on the day in question, but that as I was not in a position to prove this I paid the money, reserving to myself the right to reclaim it, should I be at any time in a position to prove that you had not been at his shop on that day, or be able to produce the woman who represented you. Should the matter by any chance ever crop up again, a copy of this protest would be an advantage.'
'At any rate, father, I could never marry Lord Halliburn unless this matter were entirely cleared up; it would be unfair to him in the extreme. He might receive an anonymous letter from these people, and if he asked me if it was true, what could I say? He has been greatly upset by the other business, what would he say did he know that I have been accused of theft? That brings us back to the subject of my engagement. You have been thinking it over since lunch, father?'