Now, in view of what had happened, her ladyship, ever impulsive, was all for going there and then to her husband to confess the whole truth, without pausing to reflect upon the consequences to others than Ned Tremayne. As you know, it was beyond her to see a thing from two points of view at one and the same time. It was also beyond her brother—the failing, as I think I have told you, was a family one—and her brother saw this matter only from the point of view of his own safety.
“A single word to Terence,” he had told her, putting his back to the door of the dressing-room to bar her intended egress, “and you realise that it will be a court-martial and a firing party for me.”
That warning effectively checked her. Yet certain stirrings of conscience made her think of the man who had imperilled himself for her sake and her brother’s.
“But, Dick, what is to become of Ned?” she had asked him.
“Oh, Ned will be all right. What is the evidence against him after all? Men are not shot for things they haven’t done. Justice will out, you know. Leave Ned to shift for himself for the present. Anyhow his danger isn’t grave, nor is it immediate, and mine is.”
Helplessly distraught, she sank to an ottoman. The night had been a very trying one for her ladyship. She gave way to tears.
“It is all your fault, Dick,” she reproached him.
“Naturally you would blame me,” he said with resignation—the complete martyr.
“If only you had been ready at the time, as he told you to be, there would have been no delays, and you would have got away before any of this happened.”
“Was it my fault that I should have reopened my wound—bad luck to it!—in attempting to get down that damned ladder?” he asked her. “Is it my fault that I am neither an ape nor an acrobat? Tremayne should have come up at once to assist me, instead of waiting until he had to come up to help me bandage my leg again. Then time would not have been lost, and very likely my life with it.” He came to a gloomy conclusion.