Her father made no answer to this question, not knowing what to say. After all, he acknowledged that had he been made the custodian of such a secret, had he had such solemn injunctions laid on him as Cundall had laid on his brother, he would have tried to keep them equally well. Honestly, he could not tell himself that Penlyn should have broken the solemn command imposed upon him; the command issued by a man who, as he gave it, was standing at the gate of the grave.
So, when Penlyn paid his next visit to Belmont, there was a very different meeting between him and its inmates from the meetings that had gone before. Sir Paul took him by the hand, and told him that he was sincerely happy in knowing that once more he and Ida were thoroughly united, and then he went into her. Not a moment elapsed before she was folded to his heart and he had kissed her again and again, not a moment before she was beseeching him to forgive her for the injurious thoughts and suspicions she had let come into her mind.
"Hush, Ida hush, my darling!" he said, as he tried to soothe her; "it is not you who should ask for forgiveness, but I. Not because I kept my brother's secret from you, but because of the brutal way in which I cast you off, simply for your doubting me for one moment. Oh, Ida, my own, say that you forgive me."
"I have nothing to forgive," she said; "the fault was mine. I should never have doubted you."
And so once more they were united, united never more to part. And since everything was now known to Ida, her future husband was able to talk freely to her, to tell her other things that had transpired of late, and especially of, what seemed to him, the strange behaviour of the Señor, and the accusation he had brought against him of shielding the murderer in his house.
"Oh, Gervase!" Ida exclaimed, "why is it that every one should be so unjust to you? Was it not enough that I should have suspected you--though only for a moment in my grief and delirium--without this man doing so in another manner. It is monstrous, monstrous!"
"Your suspicions," he answered, "were natural enough. You had had your mind disturbed by that strange dream, and, when you heard of my relationship to Cundall, it was natural that your thoughts should take the turn they did. But I cannot understand Guffanta, nor what he means."
He had recognised many times during the estrangement between him and Ida that her temporary suspicion of him was natural enough, and that--being no heroine of romance, but only a straightforward English girl, with a strange delusion as to having seen the assassin in her dream--it was not strange she should have doubted him; but for Guffanta's accusation he could find no reason. Over and over again he had asked himself whom it could be that he suspected? and again and again he had failed to find an answer. On that fatal night there had been no one sleeping in Occleve House but the servants, no one who could have gained admission to it; yet the Señor had charged him with sheltering the man who had done the deed, both on that night and afterwards.
"Can he not be made to speak out openly?" Ida asked. "Can he not be made to say who the person was whose face he saw? Why do you not force him to do so?"
"I have seen nothing of him since the night he accused me of protecting the murderer, and he has left the hotel he was staying at."