‘I want to know if you will help me in a very great trouble?’
‘With every power that I have, I will help you,’ he replied, unhesitatingly, and waited to hear what it was that he had to do.
‘Since I came in I have heard of a thing that has happened. I hardly know how to tell you of it. It makes me feel as if I had been laughing and amusing myself in some room, underneath which another person was being tortured to death.’
Her lips were parched; her eyes dilated.
‘If I did not trust you entirely,’ she said, as if she appealed to him, ‘I could not tell you.’
For a moment she was silent, while Michael waited, and then, turning to him again, told him, unfalteringly, of the discovery she had made, and repeated, word for word, the conversation between herself and Ada. Michael listened in perfect silence; it was, he felt, the only way in which to hear such a tale.
‘I have sent her home,’ Eleanor said at last, ‘that I might try to think. She is safe for to-night, since she says her mother is away, and her father will not return before eleven to-morrow. I have told her to come here early—at nine to-morrow morning. I thought I would keep her here till her parents knew. I think her father has a heart, but I cannot endure that woman, her mother. I feel that she would rail at her—not because she had done wrong, but because she had failed in getting married to Otho.’
He nodded.
‘Do you think I have done right?’
‘Perfectly right. There was nothing else to be done. Do you know where—he—is?’