"Now at last I understand Fairvale's strange reticence and melancholy," Sir Harry Clive exclaims. "He was indeed most cruelly wronged, and Marcia Cleveland must have been a fiend incarnate."
Colonel Lockhart alone says nothing. He sits a little apart, his arms folded over his broad breast, his blue eyes cast to the floor, a look of gloom and settled despair on his handsome, high-bred face. The bitter pain at his heart no tongue can tell.
"And all this while you were Leslie Noble's wife," Lady Clive says, with a heavy sigh for her brother's sake.
"But I believed him dead, you know," Lady Vera answers, with one swift glance at the lover she has lost.
"I wish he had been, for your sake and Phil's," pronounces Sir Harry, fervently, and a moan of pain surges over the pale lips of the beautiful girl.
"Ah, you cannot guess with what feelings of despair I learned of him living," she answers. "It seemed to me for one awful moment that a hand of ice clutched my heart, and that I should surely die. It came over me like a death-warrant, at what fearful cost to myself I should keep my oath to my father. But I had sworn to do his bidding. There was no turning back for me when the fatal moment came."
She pauses a moment, then resumes, with a mournful glance at Lady Clive:
"You will never forgive me, I know, for making myself a sensation and a town talk, Lady Clive. By to-morrow all London will ring with my secret. Oh, the pity and shame! But I will not disgrace you further. I shall not remain your guest any longer. To-morrow I am going away."
Then Colonel Lockhart speaks for the first time.
"You must not let her go, Nella," he says, firmly.