“I don’t care,” she muttered recklessly. “What are a few kisses? I shan’t miss ’em, and he’s obliged to keep it up for a bit before he quite breaks it off. Says it will kill her when he does. I hope it will.
“Wonder how long she’ll be?” continued Dally. “I don’t mind. I can easily get a nap to-morrow after dinner, but I don’t think she’ll care to go to sleep after master’s had his say.”
She settled herself in her place to watch if it were till doomsday, so determined did she seem; and meanwhile Hartley sat just inside the drawing-room, shrouded in complete darkness which accorded well with the blackness of spirit which was upon him.
Leo could not reach her window without passing close to him, and he thought bitterly now of his simplicity in not grasping the meaning of torn-down growth and broken trellis by the summer-house. It was all plain enough now. Thought succeeded thought. He could grasp clearly enough the meaning of North’s actions when he had attended Tom Candlish—how bitter he had seemed against him, and then the full light came.
“Why, it must have been North who had surprised Tom Candlish, and beaten him within an inch of his life, and, oh! shame—the woman must have been Leo!
“And every one must have known this but poor, weak, blind mole, Hartley Salis,” he groaned.
“Scoundrel! Base hound! Why, if I had been North!—but I’m forgetting myself,” he said, as he pressed his hands to his throbbing brows, and felt that the veins in his temples were full and turgid.
“Not a word to me! Well, how could he speak, and complain to me? Oh, shame, shame, shame!”
The hot tears of indignation started to his eyes; the first that had been there for many years, and they seemed to scald him till he dashed them fiercely away.
“I stand to her in the place of father,” he muttered sternly; “and I’ll do my duty by her, even if I have to keep her under lock and key.”