"I suppose the writer thought I would not have courage to tell you—but I always believe in speaking out, you know."
"It may be some low practical joke at our expense," he suggested, his eyes lightening.
"No, even I, who never saw an anonymous letter before, could tell that this is horridly real. Whoever it is, Lord Clandonald, you—and now I—have a desperate enemy. I am threatened with a scene, an exposure, she calls it, that will disgrace me utterly, if I am seen again with you."
"Let me risk it for you! Let me stand between you and all liars, evil speakers and slanderers, for always—" the man exclaimed passionately, then stopped short.
There was that in the girl's look that startled him from his unconsidered speech. The staring white light of the electric globe immediately above them showed the bloom forsaking her young face, the lips trembling violently.
"It proves how little we know of each other that I should let you say such words to one who has no right to hear them," she said, recovering herself to speak in her natural tone. "But if we mayn't be friends, after this, please remember that I have believed you, not your slanderer. Now, as my father doesn't seem to be coming back, and this is not my native air, if it is yours, I will say good-by. We'll be too busy and too cross to want to speak to each other to-morrow morning, even if it were wise. If you meet me again, it will be a different Pamela Winstanley, one who knows more, perhaps, and makes fewer mistakes, but who'll never forget your kindness on this voyage."
Clandonald was bewildered at her rapid change back into the speech of conventionality, her self-control, her determination to put him definitely away from her. His brain was also dizzy with thoughts of the dread presence on shipboard of the one woman he had hoped never to see on earth again. What he might, could or would have answered Miss Winstanley was not said.
They stood together uncertainly for one confusing moment in what seemed a moist gray world, haunted by skulking shadows in tarpaulin, the chill wind of the Channel whipping them, overhead the repeated raucous roar of the fog-horn—and then she was gone, melted away into encompassing gloom! His ship-idyl, his mad brief temptations of a few moments since, were past. He was back again in England with his bitter memories and cheerless future.
To Mariol he gave, before bed-time, an account of the outrage to which Miss Winstanley had been subjected, begging him to try to trace out the offender, and silence her at any cost.
The Frenchman, promising to do this, and relieved at the collapse of his friend's nascent affair with Miss Winstanley, was hardly surprised, on awaking next day, and finding their ship safely alongside her dock in Liverpool, to be told that his lordship, impatient of delay, had gone ashore during the night in the tender that had nosed its way to the fog-bound liner to carry off the mails, leaving his servant to follow with his luggage.