Charley looked at him with wondering eyes.
“Had she a fe—female—a young lady with her?” he inquired, expecting that the presence of Helen Grahame might have been the occasion of her reservation.
“No,” returned Mark, in the same voice; “she had a child in her arms.”
He strode abruptly away as he concluded.
Charley staggered back. A bullet through his body could not have inflicted upon him a greater shock.
A thousand conjectures flashed through his mind; and he paced his room in perturbed agony. Who could give him an inkling of her betrayer?—for that she had been basely betrayed he was sure. He could think of no one to aid him but Vivian, and him he knew not where to find.
Yet he did meet with him, and that while on his frenzied way to see his sister.
In a few hurried, agonized words, he told Hal, who was unacquainted with Lotte’s absence, of his discovery of her abode, of Mark’s visit and its result.
“I know Lotte,” said Hal, with marked impressiveness, and a knitted brow. “I know and esteem Mark Wilton also. I have occasion to do so, Charley; but he or any man had better think well ere they utter one sentence or half a word to defame Lotte’s truth or purity in my hearing.”
“Do you not think, then——”