“Yes,” she said faintly. “I could not tell you all in my letter. I wanted—I want still—somebody's help.”
“And it is very natural you should apply for mine, cousin, I will do anything I can. I have”—the minister grew sensibly more severe, more grave—“I have this day, on the train, seen a paper—a new kind of paper to me, I confess,—a Society Journal it calls itself, in which a name is mentioned. Is your—trouble—connected with that?”
Miss De Grammont blushed deeply. “Yes. That is my name. I would not have troubled you—but I must ask your advice, for you are the only one of the family, of my mother's family—” Her voice broke.
“Yes, cousin, you are right.”
The minister rose and stood up before her, a stern though not unsympathetic figure in his stiff black coat and iron gray hair. “I know what you are going to ask me to do. You will ask me to see these people, these editors, reviewers, whatever they are, to talk to them, to impress upon them what you are and who you are, and who your mother was, and what is the end of the base man who imagines lies and the end of all the workers of iniquity. You will ask me to tell them that it is all false, all abominable intrigue and treachery and I shall demand in your name and in my own as your only near relative and a minister of the Gospel, an apology. It is but jealousy, cousin. Forgive me, but you are too beautiful and too young to live alone in such a house, in such a manner. You must marry. Or else you must give up such a life. It maketh enemies within your gates and behold! there shall be no man to say a good thing of thee!”
The minister had lifted up his voice as if he had been in the pulpit and for one instant laid his hand on his cousin's hair. Then he went back to his seat.
Miss De Grammont was profoundly moved. Great tears coursed down her cheeks and until they had stopped she could not trust herself to speak.
“The paper!” she said dismally. “You have seen a paper, you say, with—my—my name in it! There is nothing new in that. I have been in the papers for months past. I am never out of them. And this one says—”
The minister drew it out of his pocket.
“That with you, in this house lives, in the character of a butler, an exiled Italian Prince who committed grave personal and political offences many years ago and was sent to prison. That you are married to him. My dear cousin, it is monstrous!”