“We must part. You and Mr Redmayne are safe here. Therefore I shall to-morrow leave Worthing.”
“But this is dastardly!” he cried in fierce resentment. “Are you to live always in this glass house, for your enemies to hound you from place to place, because a man dares to admire your beauty? What is your future to be?”
She fixed her calm gaze upon him in the pale moonlight.
“Who can tell?” she sighed sadly. “For the present we must think only of the present. My enemies have discovered me, therefore it is imperative that we should part. Yet before doing so I want to thank you very much for all the services you and Mr Redmayne have rendered me. Rest assured that they will never be forgotten—never.”
Roddy and Leucha had seated themselves upon a seat facing the beach, and they were now slowly approaching them.
“I hardly know how to take leave of you,” Guy said, speaking slowly and very earnestly. “You, on your part, have been so good and generous to Leucha and myself. If these scandalmongers only knew that she loved me and that I reciprocated her affection, they surely would not seek to propagate this shameful report concerning us.”
“It would make no difference to them,” she declared in a low, hoarse voice of grief. “For their purposes—in order that I shall be condemned as worthless, and prevented from returning to Treysa—they must continue to invent their vile fictions against my honour as a woman.”
“The fiends!” he cried fiercely. “But you shall be even with them yet! They fear you—and they shall, one day, have just cause for their fears. We will assist you—Roddy and I. We will together prove your honesty and innocence before the whole world.”
They gained the seat whereon Leucha and her father were sitting, and Claire sat down to rest before the softly sighing sea, while her companion stood, she having forgotten to give him permission to be seated. She was so unconventional that she often overlooked such points, and, to her intimate friends, would suddenly laugh and apologise for her forgetfulness.
While all four were chatting and laughing together—for Roddy had related a droll incident he had witnessed that day out at Goring—there came along the sea-path two figures of men, visitors like themselves, judging from their white linen trousers and straw hats. Their approach was quite unnoticed until of a sudden they both halted before the group, and one of them, a brown-bearded man, stepping up to the younger man, said, in a stern, determined voice,—