Remained but to choose her confidant. Nature suggested Terence. But it was against Terence in particular that she had been warned. Circumstance now offered Sylvia Armytage. But pride, or vanity if you prefer it, denied her here. Sylvia was an inexperienced young girl, as she herself had so often found occasion to remind her cousin. Moreover, she fostered the fond illusion that Sylvia looked to her for precept, that upon Sylvia’s life she exercised a precious guiding influence. How, then, should the supporting lean upon the supported? Yet since she must, there and then, lean upon something or succumb instantly and completely, she chose a middle course, a sort of temporary assistance.
“I have been imagining things,” she said. “It may be a premonition, I don’t know. Do you believe in premonitions, Sylvia?”
“Sometimes,” Sylvia humoured her.
“I have been imagining that if Dick is hiding, a fugitive, he might naturally come to me for help. I am fanciful, perhaps,” she added hastily, lest she should have said too much. “But there it is. All day the notion has clung to me, and I have been asking myself desperately what I should do in such a case.”
“Time enough to consider it when it happens, Una. After all—”
“I know,” her ladyship interrupted on that ever-ready note of petulance of hers. “I know, of course. But I think I should be easier in my mind if I could find an answer to my doubt. If I knew what to do, to whom to appeal for assistance, for I am afraid that I should be very helpless myself. There is Terence, of course. But I am a little afraid of Terence. He has got Dick out of so many scrapes, and he is so impatient of poor Dick. I am afraid he doesn’t understand him, and so I should be a little frightened of appealing to Terence again.”
“No,” said Sylvia gravely, “I shouldn’t go to Terence. Indeed he is the last man to whom I should go.”
“You say that too!” exclaimed her ladyship.
“Why?” quoth Sylvia sharply. “Who else has said it?”
There was a brief pause in which Lady O’Moy shuddered. She had been so near to betraying herself. How very quick and shrewd Sylvia was! She made, however, a good recovery.