"Love lost, much lost. Honour lost, all lost."
Honour is not lost--not yet. Happiness? That's nothing. Life is short, and there's another life to look to. A coward turns his back on the fight. A deserter falls out of the ranks. The strong should hold up the weak"--suddenly he looked round for her--"Leo?"
Leo meekly raised her eyes, overmastered, dumb. It was the hardest moment of Paul's life. One look, one word between them, and she would have been dragged down into the whirlpool from which it was his part to save her. A great convulsion shook his frame, and he set his teeth and swore, then drew her gently to his side.
"My little sister must forget all this. It is a bad dream and it is over and past. She must promise me----"
"She must promise me--solemnly--before God, in Whose Presence we are"--he looked up, the sky was clear and shining overhead--"that she will never--mark me, Leo, _never_--as long as life lasts, allow herself to think of cutting it short again. Before God, Leo!"
He lifted her hand, still fast in his, as though invoking the Unseen Presence, and almost inaudibly she repeated after him the words of the promise.
"We must hasten home now," said Paul, with a rapid transition to another tone. "The short cut from Claymount is somewhere hereabouts," looking round--"and we shall get back," he took out his watch, "before the house is shut up, if we walk briskly. You can walk, can't you? I mean, of course you will have to walk, but can you step out? If you would care to have an arm----"
"I can walk quite well, thank you--but, oh, Paul, just this--mayn't I say it----?"
"Better not, dear." The word slipped out; he was unconscious of it, but she heard. They hurried home.
Somebody, and that a formidable personage, had been a witness of the scene just narrated.
We would not for a moment call poor Val Purcell an eavesdropper _au naturel_, but he certainly had a talent for picking up by the wayside things which did not exactly belong to him.
Val, as we know, was not quite like other people.
It was only now and then that he showed this; in the ordinary give and take of society he passed muster well enough, and no one would more readily have spurned the notion of doing what others did not do--that being the poor boy's code of conduct,--yet he is not to be hardly judged if occasionally it failed him at a pinch. Wherefore if when passing through the Abbey woods on the afternoon in question, he heard voices and crept near to peep and listen, let it be believed that the feeling which arrested his footsteps was in its way innocent. His curiosity was roused, and he had a hearty sympathy with sylvan lovers; so if Jack and Jill were courting, there was no reason why he should not see which Jack and Jill it was? He would not tell tales, not he.