"Really and truly," he said, speaking in a tone of hauteur that perhaps veiled a feeling of bitter mortification. "The marvel does not lie in that, but in how you came to know of it."
"I guessed it," said Georgina.
"Guessed it!"
She quietly told him the whole from the beginning: her meeting with the man in the morning, the news Mrs. St. John brought about the note, the fancied view of Lady Anne.
"The truth seemed to come over me in a moment," she concluded. "I knew you were arrested; I was sure it was nothing else. And I ran all the way here to ask if I can do anything for you. I saw by the note that you dare not tell Mrs. St. John."
"Dare is not quite the word, Georgina. If I can spare her I will do so, for I know it would grieve her cruelly. The affair would not have been the trouble of a quarter-of-an-hour, but for Isaac's being away. Things always do happen by contraries."
"You think he would--he would--what could he have done?" she asked, her anxious face and its earnest eyes turned up to him.
"He would have paid the claim and set me free. As it is, nothing can be done until he comes home tomorrow."
"How much is the claim?"
Frederick St. John drew in his lips. "It is amidst the hundreds. Nay, how scared you look! It was a clever trick, their sending the fellow down here after me."