“I don’t know his name. How do you——”
“I buried him in the snow!” said Captain O’Hagan with impressive finality.
Dillon dropped limply on to the big property-basket.
“Then Sheila never cared for him! And he is dead! And it was you, an old friend, and a friend of my father’s, whom——”
“You have been a villain to her!—a villain to Miss Chatterton—doubly a villain to me!——”
Sir Brian sprang up, his face boyish, bright with a glad contrition.
“Captain O’Hagan!” he cried, “will you take my hand? A hundred thousand times I apologise! Can you forgive me! Do you think Sheila can?”
* * * * *
“At such times,” my mendacious friend has informed me, “to lie becomes a virtue. Dillon distrusted his wife’s old admirer—whose name he had quixotically, though fortunately, avoided learning. Therefore, preparatory to peace, the anonymous gentleman had to be whitewashed. His whitewashing accomplished, next, in order to insure Dillon’s silence respecting his history, he had to be buried for ever.
“I buried him in the eternal snows, Raymond. What more appropriate tomb for the rejected lover?”