Honora's eyes were again eagerly searching the priest's face, but Mrs. Gerald was in turn looking away from him.
"And why was he right, madam?" demanded F. Chevreuse.
She did not look up to answer, and her expression was of that stubborn reserve which some good people assume when they cannot say anything friendly, and are determined not to be uncharitable. "I may be wrong," she said, carefully choosing her words, "but it does not seem to me that you are the person of whom he should take advice now. Pardon me, F. Chevreuse! I do not mean to criticise you nor dictate to you, of course. But I am glad that you are to have nothing to do with this. You should be spared the pain."
He was too sore-hearted to argue the point; and he knew, moreover, that argument would be thrown away. He was well aware that the most of his friends thought his generosity sometimes exaggerated, and were more likely to check than to encourage him. When he went out of the beaten track, he had never found sympathy anywhere but with the one whose loss he felt more and more every day, unless it might be with Annette Ferrier and her mother.
"It seems that I am not to have anything to do with it," he said; "though I fail to see why I should not. Let that pass, however. I pity the poor fellow from my heart, though his detention will be a short one, since the trial, they tell me, is to come on immediately. It is a miserable condition, being shut up in that place, and loaded with such an outrageous accusation. I do not wonder it made him bitter and distrustful of me."
Mrs. Gerald lifted her eyes quickly, and gave F. Chevreuse a glance that recalled to his mind that look from which he had shrunk in the prison. He could not understand it, but it made him shiver. Not that it expressed any suspicion or accusation; it seemed only to ask searchingly if there were no suspicion in his own mind.
"Well, good-by!" he said hastily. "Let us all beware of uncharitableness in thought, word, and deed."
When he had reached the street-door he heard Miss Pembroke's step following him.
"You have really nothing to tell me?" she asked, trembling as she held her shawl about her. "Recollect that I and this man have spoken together as friends. Am I still to believe in him?"
"Oh! fie, Honora Pembroke!" the priest exclaimed sorrowfully. "Is that the kind of friendship you give, that you doubt a person at the first wild charge made against him?"