“I cannot stay, Mr. Swinton, thank you. I have just run down to beg you to put me in communication with your son. Oh, you can’t think what it has meant to me. It has saved me from an unhappy marriage.”
“Your engagement to Mr. Ormsby is broken off?”
“Yes.”
“Because you think you’ll be able to marry Dick?”
“Yes. Why do you speak of Dick like that?” she asked, with a sudden sinking at the heart. “Surely, you do not join in the general condemnation—you, 269 his own father! Oh, it isn’t true what they told me—that he’s a forger, who will have to answer to the law, and go to prison. It isn’t true.”
“Dick himself is the only person who can answer your questions.”
“But where is he? I suppose I can write to him?”
“He’s in hiding,” said the rector, brokenly. The words seemed to be choking him.
“In hiding! Dick, who faced a dozen rifles and flung defiance in the teeth of his country’s enemies—in hiding!”
“Just for the present—just for the present. You see, they would arrest him. It’s so much better to prepare a defense when one has liberty than—than—from the Tombs.”