"Yes, I did," Grace replied, flaming up, and looking straight into her antagonist's eyes. "I knew him to be an honorable man, utterly incapable of the meanness of which he is accused!"
"You think so? I hope you may not be mistaken; but I fear there is no doubt of his guilt. It is only another instance of human frailty."
"The worst human frailty is repeating and believing such falsehoods!" returned the girl, in a voice tremulous with indignation.
"We all knew him rather well," Mordaunt called out from the other end of the table, coming, like a gallant gentleman as he was, to his sister's rescue. "We are sure he will be proved innocent of the charge, but in the meantime we avoid the subject, don't you know."
"I can quite understand that," replied Lady Clydesdale, with a very peculiar inflection. "It is so very difficult sometimes to speak the truth about—one's friends. He was no friend of mine—so I can do it."
"We shall find no difficulty in doing that about you, Lady Clydesdale. I know you are truth itself, and you will supply us with all the details."
Mrs. Reid, who saw that the relations between her English guests were strained, here swooped down upon the young man, while her son, at the other end of the table, diverted Lady Clydesdale's attention to the congenial subject of female suffrage.
After dinner, in the drawing-room, Miss Pie came and sat beside Grace.
"I admired you so much standing up for your friends at dinner—Mrs. Courtly and that Englishman. Lady Clydesdale is a very able woman—quite a pioneer for our sex. But she is a little apt to lay down the law."