"That is enough, Miss Russell," said Sir Arthur gravely. "I am perfectly satisfied, and I have no right to ask for an explanation. The wedding shall be absolutely private; no one shall be asked except ourselves. Vane shall marry them early in the morning, we will come back here for lunch, and then they will go straight off to Paris. I will tell the Garthornes about it afterwards."
"Yes," said Dora, "I think that would be best."
That night Carol and Dora had a talk in Carol's room. It was rather a discussion perhaps than a conversation, and the question was whether Sir Arthur and Vane should be told the dreadful secret which Carol had discovered at Reginald Garthorne's wedding. Carol, clean-hearted and straightforward as she was naturally, shrank in horror from such a revelation as this; but Dora, whose nature was deeper, and who had a stronger religious bias, felt that at all hazards the truth should be told, horrible as it was.
"That man Garthorne," she said, "is a brute. I am perfectly certain that he deliberately made your brother drunk that day at Oxford—I mean that he took advantage of the weakness that you discovered to tempt him to go on drinking, so that he might get drunk on the most important morning of his life. He knew very well what he was doing. He knew if he could only make him drunk that morning, everything would be at an end between him and Miss Raleigh."
"But, my dear Dora, suppose that is so, and I hope it isn't," replied Carol, "how on earth can you have found that out? Of course, if it really is so, Vane and Sir Arthur ought to know of it, and, well, I suppose of the other thing too, dreadful and all as it is, but——"
"I see what you mean," said Dora, "and I will tell you why. In the first place, when we were at the flat, Bernard—I mean Mr. Falcon—told me one or two things Mr. Garthorne had said to him when they were getting confidential over their whiskies, and I had a few minutes' talk with Mr. Ernshaw this evening which—well, what Mr. Falcon told me and what he said were the two and two that made four. I am afraid that is not very grammatical, but it is true. Of course he wouldn't have told me if I had not said something about it; but the moment he told me about your brother's collapse that morning the truth came to me like a flash. Reginald Garthorne is a scoundrel, and his father is worse, for he is a hypocrite as well as a scoundrel. He pretends to be Sir Arthur's friend—he has done so for years. He has allowed his son to steal Vane's life-long love from him, knowing all that he himself did—and, well, no—I can't say the rest."
"You mean," said Carol quietly, and with a note of hardness in her voice, "you mean that he is my father. It is very dreadful, isn't it?"
"Yes, Dora, it is, but you are not to blame after all; you didn't know, and of course we must admit that Mr. Garthorne didn't know so morally. You are both quite innocent there, but there is someone else just now. We've been friends and comrades now for a long time, tell me, dear, does Mr. Rayburn know?"
"I have told him everything," replied Carol, with an effort which she could not conceal, even from Dora.
"Yes, everything, even the very worst. You know when, as he says, he fell in love with me and, as I told you, began to treat me altogether differently, and then asked me to marry him, I said 'No.' I felt that I couldn't say 'Yes' honestly unless he knew everything. I had got very fond of him, and I suppose that was the reason why. I felt that I had to tell him the truth, and so I told him. Of course it wouldn't have been the straight thing to do anything else. If he had been like other men——"