“What?”
“Come away, Claude,” whispered Mary, who was white and trembling. “It is a horrible invention. There is no truth in it. Come back into the drawing-room, and I’ll tell you quietly, dear, what I have heard.”
“Go on,” said Claude, fixing the two women with her eyes as she held her cousin’s arm and half forced her back. “Tell me everything you have heard.”
Between them, trembling the while before the wild eyes which seemed to force them to speak, the women related confusedly the report they had heard, one which had grown rapidly as is the custom with such news; and out of the tangle, as Sarah Woodham and Mary both strangely moved, stood speechless and silent, Claude learned the charge which had arisen against the man she loved, to the bitter end, struggling the while to make indignant denial of that at which her soul felt to revolt. But no words would come. Her reason, her soul, both cried out aloud within her that this was an utter impossibility, but the rumours mastered them with a terrible array of facts, till she was forced to believe that, stung to madness by the treatment he had received, and hurried on by a lust for gold, Chris, her old playmate and brother as a child, the man at last she had grown to love, had been tempted to commit this deed.
“It is not true—it is not true,” something within her kept on saying as she gazed wildly from one to the other, seeing the gap—the black gap—already existing between her and her lover, widening into an awful, impassable chasm, in which were buried her life’s hopes and happiness for ever.
Volume Three—Chapter Nine.
A Debate.
Glyddyr had undoubtedly gone backward in health with rapid strides since he and the Doctor had last met, not many hours before. His face was of a sickly yellow; there were dark marks under his eyes, and his hands trembled as he weakly arranged the flower in his button-hole, and played with his blue serge yachting cap.