This was a terrible blow. I looked away appealingly. 'Harold,' I cried in despair, 'do you think we could manage to hide ourselves safely anywhere in Scotland for twenty-one days?'
His face fell. 'How could I escape notice? All the world is hunting for me. And then the scandal! No matter where you stopped—however far from me—no, Lois darling, I could never expose you to it.'
The minister glanced from one to the other of us, puzzled. 'Harold?' he said, turning over the word on his tongue. 'Harold? That doesn't sound like an Indian name, does it? And——' he hesitated, 'you speak wonderful English!'
I saw the safest plan was to make a clean breast of it. He looked the sort of man one could trust on an emergency. 'You have heard of the Ashurst will case?' I said, blurting it out suddenly.
'I have seen something about it in the newspapers; yes. But it did not interest me: I have not followed it.'
I told him the whole truth; the case against us—the facts as we knew them. Then I added, slowly, 'This is Mr. Harold Tillington, whom they accuse of forgery. Does he look like a forger? I want to marry him before he is tried. It is the only way by which I can prove my implicit trust in him. As soon as we are married, he will give himself up at once to the police—if you wish it, before your eyes. But married we must be. Can't you manage it somehow?'
My pleading voice touched him. 'Harold Tillington?' he murmured. 'I know of his forebears. Lady Guinevere Tillington's son, is it not? Then you must be Younger of Gledcliffe.' For Scotland is a village: everyone in it seems to have heard of every other.'
'What does he mean?' I asked. 'Younger of Gledcliffe?' I remembered now that the phrase had occurred in Mr. Ashurst's will, though I never understood it.
'A Scotch fashion,' Harold answered. 'The heir to a laird is called Younger of so-and-so. My father has a small estate of that name in Dumfriesshire; a very small estate: I was born and brought up there.'
'Then you are a Scotchman?' the minister asked.