"Shall we go in, mother?" asked Margaret.
"No, my dear, not yet!" answered Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Captain Coles is just going to tell us what really happened to the young lady who was so mercifully spared. Go on, Captain, please."
"Well, the story is a short one, though thrilling enough, egad!—to put into a romance!" said the Captain. "Young Waldron, that we met at the Profile, was one of the party, and he told me about it while you were dressing for supper. It appears that Miss Vanderlyn went up with her brother, and that something happened to his horse—it got lamed, or something,—so that he could not ride down with her. He was fool enough, then, to put her under the charge of that friend of yours, Margaret—"
"Captain Coles, will you be kind enough to confine yourself to your story, if you must tell it, and leave my name out of the question?" was the interruption of the young lady—no unpleasant one to the listener,—at that point of the narration.
"Humph! I do not see that you need be so sensitive about it!" sneered back the Captain. "Well, then, not that friend of yours, but that man, who has not less than a dozen names and who lives in Philadelphia and Cincinnati and several other cities."
"Yes, the man whose handkerchief you took out of his pocket the other night, in the ten-pin alley, to see whether his initials were correct!" again interrupted Margaret in a tone of voice not less decided than that of the other was taunting and arrogant.
It was much too dark, under the shade of the trees, at that moment, to see the face of Captain Hector Coles, or he might have been discovered, even under his moustache, biting his lip so sharply that the blood came. An eye keen enough to have seen this, too, would have been able to see that Horace Townsend trembled like an aspen leaf, that great beads of sweat started out on his brown forehead, while he muttered a fierce word of anger and indignation that died away on the night air without reaching any human ear.
Captain Hector Coles choked an instant and then went on:
"He entrusted her to the care of that adventurer, who managed, before they had ridden a mile, to lose his way and his presence of mind at the same time—got her and her pony on the top of a slippery rock where there were ten thousand chances to one that she would fall a thousand feet over the precipice—and then sat on his horse, white as a sheet and too badly scared to attempt rescuing her, yelling like a booby for help, until that coarse fellow from somewhere out West came up and grasped her just as she was going over."
What would not Horace Townsend have given for a grip of the throat of Captain Hector Coles at that moment? And what would he not have given to hear Margaret Hayley say: "I do not believe the story! The man who leaped into the Pool the other day, is not the booby and poltroon you would make him, just because you are jealous of him, Captain Hector Coles!" What, we say, would the listener not have given to hear that? Alas!—he had no reason to expect any such word, and no such word was spoken. Margaret Hayley merely rose from her seat, saying: