“For—well—for my peace of mind,” she said, though I was sure that she had intended saying something else.
“You have already told me that this fellow is unfitted to be her husband,” I exclaimed. “Surely you, her oldest friend, will never allow her to commit this fatal error—to wreck her own happiness and mine, without lifting a finger to save her. Need I repeat to you what I told you at the riverside at Studland, with what a fierce passion I adore her, how that she is mine—my very life?”
“I know,” my companion said, in a voice slightly more sympathetic. “I admit that she ought to marry you—that she is yours in heart. Yet in her secret engagement to Gordon-Wright there is a mystery which makes me suspicious.”
“Suspicious of what?”
She sighed, and moving forward rested her hands upon the balcony, gazing again towards the fiery sunset.
“Well—to put it plainly—that she is deceiving both of us.”
“Deceiving us! In what way?”
“Ah! that is what we have not yet discovered,” replied the girl. “Think of her ingenuity in coming to our house in order to see that man in secret, of how cleverly she made us believe that they were strangers—of her listening to my father’s words when he spoke with Gordon-Wright! All this proves to me that she is working with some mysterious end.”
“She has been endeavouring to effect her emancipation from that scoundrel,” I protested hotly. “She has been trying to break away from him, but in vain. Her motive, Miss Miller, is not an evil one as regards either your father or yourself, you may rest assured. She only desires freedom—freedom to live and to love, the freedom that you, if you will, can assist her to obtain.”
“I—” she cried. “How can I?”