“Or the stwength of our fwiend Gwahame’s fine old pawt,” exclaimed the Duke, with a loud laugh.
Mr. Grahame instantly took Helen to task in so serious and so stately a manner, that Lester Vane interfered to obtain pardon for her, which was granted, at his instance, in a manner that mortified her only more bitterly than she had yet been.
“I will bring him a suppliant to my feet,” she said, mentally, as her eyes, sparkling like a star, fastened upon him, “and when he is prostrate, abject, I’ll crush him remorselessly.”
The next evening, Helen and Lester were walking in the garden together. She had already begun to weave her web round him, and he seemed likely to become so enmeshed as never more to escape from it.
Suddenly, when near the ornamental water, he paused. He drew from his breast a small but exquisitely fine cambric handkerchief.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Grahame,” he said, “if I betray any impertinent curiosity, but I am desirous of knowing whether you are acquainted with this handkerchief?”
She looked at it. In a corner, embroidered, were the initials “H. G.” It was her own, and one of value. She smiled.
“Indeed,” she answered, “I ought to know it well, Mr. Vane.”
“I found it beneath a tree, there,” he added, pointing to the thicket in which she had parted with Hugh Riversdale.
She had, no doubt, dropped it on leaving Hugh the night before. She felt an acute pain run through her brain, as she saw in what direction his finger pointed, and that as he spoke his eyes were absolutely glaring upon her. She detected, in an instant, how much depended upon her answer. Controlling, as before, with a remarkable exertion of self-will, the expression of her features, she assumed an air of indifference, and flinging the handkerchief into the stream, upon the brink of which she was standing, she answered--
“Possibly; it is one I some time since gave to my maid, Chayter.”
Lester was unable to utter a word in reply; he was baffled. He watched the handkerchief float away, and he said to himself--
“Yet it was you who stood last night in the thicket along with the fellow who felled me to the earth. Despite this check, I will proye it, and to you.”
The emotion displayed by old Wilton when Colonel Mires made himself known to him by reference to an incident which had occurred to him at a period now long past, was a mystery to the two persons likely to be best acquainted with its source.