Once more alone in the sitting room, Helen inquired of Evangeline where her sister Margaret was, and upon what plea she had quitted the scene of affliction.
Evangeline simply recounted the circumstances connected with the mysterious elopement with the Duke of St. Allborne, and expressed her wonder that Margaret should not have stopped at home, and been married in the proper and usual fashion. Helen, with burning cheeks and suffocating emotion, rose up and paced the room, placing her hands upon her beating temples. Suddenly she turned round and said—
“Where was Malcolm, that he did not follow them?”
“Malcolm told me that the Honorable Mr. Vane advised him not to do so. He said that it was a mere romantic flight to Gretna Green, and that it would all come right at last.”
“Villain! atrocious villain!” muttered Helen; and then said, sharply, “but where is Malcolm now? Why should he, my poor Evangeline, have deserted you in this dreadful crisis?”
“He is in prison!” returned Evangeline, with, a shudder. “A gentle’—I—I mean it was explained to me that he had incurred debts and did not pay them, and therefore the creditor, by help of the law, put him into prison until he can make some arrangement.”
Helen clasped her hands.
“This is an abject fall for pride, indeed!” she exclaimed, with bitterness.
As her eye fell upon Evangeline’s sweet, artless face, in gratitude that at least she had escaped the heavy visitations which had fallen on the other members of her family, she observed that her skin—so rarely delicate and white in its accustomed aspect—was suffused with crimson, and that she seemed strangely confused.
“It was explained to me,” suddenly recurred to Helen, as a sentence Evangeline had uttered with some embarrassment. Then it flashed through her mind that she had found her tête-à-tête with a young and handsome man, whose face she did not at the moment recognise—like as he was, in his general contour, to Lotte Clinton.