Madge paused a moment, overwhelmed; then she turned on him with passionate scorn. "Oh, how you have deceived us! Then all the time you have been here you were only a thief—a common thief, at heart. Oh!"—she waved her hand with a gesture of horror—"you acted well as a pretender, a masquerader, a specious, lying counterfeit of honesty." She turned to her cousin: "Jack! Jack! speak!"
"For Heaven's sake, Madge, don't go on so. I—I can't stand it, I tell you," exclaimed Jack, violently. "I—I——"
"SHE TURNED ON HIM WITH PASSIONATE SCORN."
"Hush! hush! There is no need to say anything further," broke in Cyril, hastily. "Miss Westbrook will keep silence, I am sure. I only ask for a few hours' grace."
Madge swept out of the study without another word. Cyril pushed the reluctant Jack and then followed him. At the doctor's door Madge left them and, her heart broken with passion, sought her room. The old man had been awaiting the arrival of the young men in a fever of impatience. The first excitement consequent on the capture of the burglars having subsided somewhat, he had had time to reflect. It had occurred to him then that the thieves must have effected their entrance by the study door; they could scarcely have done so by the window. In this case they had, he thought, probably entered by means of a skeleton key and had escaped in the same manner.
It was a pitiful, distasteful farce to Cyril, but it had to be acted through to the finale. The birds had flown, of course, and equally of course by the French window found open in the corridor.
Search parties were sent out, and Cyril wondered with a pang what could be Madge's feelings as the flickering lights wandered to and fro in the garden on their wild-goose chase.
The next day Madge did not leave her room, and Cyril Wayne, feeling that he was the cause, hastened his departure. One more lie, he bitterly told himself, and his career of deception was concluded. It was an intense relief, sore as his heart might be, to get away as far as possible from Highbank. He had spent there the happiest and the most painful hours of his existence.