"Oh, sir!" panted Susan.--"I mean, Your Lordship! So it wasn't never me at all?"
"Oh, Your Lordship!" she gasped. "Then ... who ... who ... who was it?"
I caught my breath. Gibson bent forward to be sure that all was well. Ruddington drew my free arm through his and smiled.
"Oh, Miss Gertrude," she cried, with a great sob, "thank God!"
Both her warm arms were round my neck. Her soft girlish breast pressed mine, and I could feel her true heart beating wildly with grief and joy. Holding her to me as a mother holds a weeping child, I felt strangely calm. I watched the moonlight dappling the ground under the tree. I heard the sounds of the night: the stirring leaves, the far-off plash of the waves, the soft croon of the wind, the swirl of the beck, and loudest of all, my true-hearted Susan's sobs.
"Yes," I said softly. "Susan ... Gibson ... thank God! For to-night He has been good to us all."
Then I too became as a little child. I broke down and sobbed in Susan's warm embrace till a strong arm clasped me round and led me tenderly away.
A month to-day since we came to France! This morning is gay. The young sunbeams are dancing on the sea, the air is soft, the sky is necked with little white clouds like a blue bay alive with sails. I have been standing on the balcony with my hair floating in the wind. Down on the grass in the garden, three plump, pretty gulls are quite at home.
He prayed that he might come here early this morning, but I said No, not till eleven--the time appointed!
How much there will be to ask, how much to tell! I don't understand yet how the mistake was made. All I have worked out so far is that he saw me three times with--Alice! The Derlingham know-alls, in a hurry to answer his questions before he had fairly asked them, jumped to the conclusion that he had seen me with Susan. It seems he inquired who was the shorter one, the younger one, the prettier one: and both the know-alls made haste to assure him (a courtly compliment, this, to poor me!) that it was Susan--Susan Briggs, Miss Langley's maid. Then a dozen things conspired, he says, to confirm him in his blunder, just as a dozen things have conspired to drag me into this affair and to involve me in it more and more.