‘My dear girl,’ said the Colonel, putting his hand on her shoulder, ‘I am most thankful we did not trust to letters, but came. It’s enough to look at you. You must give us your authority, and we will soon make an end of these slanderers. By Jove! in the old days it would have been pistols that would have done it.’
‘You can’t use pistols to women,’ said Mr. d’Eyncourt, ‘if you were the greatest fire-eater that ever was.’
They both laughed a little at this, but the soul was taken out of the laugh by the perception slowly dawning upon both that Mrs. Blencarrow had said nothing, did not join either in their laugh or their thankfulness for having come, and had, indeed, slightly shrunk from her brother’s hand, and still stood without asking them to sit down.
‘I’m afraid you are angry with us,’ said Roger d’Eyncourt, ‘for having hurried here as if we believed it. But there never is any certainty in such matters. We thought it better to settle it at once—at the fountain-head.’
‘Yes,’ she said, but no more.
The brothers looked at each other again, this time uneasily.
‘My dear Joan,’ said the Colonel—but he did not know how to go on.
‘The fact is,’ said Mr. d’Eyncourt, ‘that you must give us your authority to contradict it, don’t you know—to say authoritatively that there is not a shadow of truth——’
‘Won’t you sit down?’ said Mrs. Blencarrow.
‘Eh? Ah! Oh yes,’ said both men together. They thought for a moment that she was giving them her ‘authority,’ as they said. The Colonel rolled an easy chair near to her. Roger d’Eyncourt stood up against the glow of the fire.