She had opened her eyes and was looking at him as though she were dazed.

'Where am I? what has happened? why are you giving me brandy, Captain Burnett?'

'You have been ill,' he returned coolly; 'are you subject to these fainting fits? I want you to try and stand, and then I will help you to my fly. Porter, will you take those parcels, please. Now, Mrs. Blake, do you think you can walk?'

'I will try,' she replied in an exhausted voice, but just at that moment Mat O'Brien pa.s.sed. 'Oh, I remember,' she gasped; 'the madman! It was he who frightened me so, Captain Burnett,' looking at him with a return of the old terror in her face and a sort of wildness in her eyes. 'You did not believe that improbable story? How can I, a widow, have a living husband?' And she laughed hysterically.

'Will you permit me to a.s.sist you?' was Michael's sole answer, as he lifted her from the seat; 'can you fasten your bonnet? I was obliged to give you air.' But as her trembling hands could not perform the office, he was compelled to do it himself. 'Now you can come,' he went on in a quiet, authoritative voice, that was not without its effect on her, and half leading, half supporting her, he placed her at last safely in the fly. But as he seated himself beside her, and they drove off, in the gathering dusk of the March evening, he felt a cold hand grip his wrist.

'Oh, Captain Burnett, do say that you did not believe him!'

Michael was silent.

'It was too utterly horrible, too improbable altogether!' she continued with a shudder; 'no man calling himself a gentleman ought to believe such an accusation against a woman.'

Still silence.

'If it should reach my boy's ear, he will be ready to kill him.'

'Mrs. Blake, will you listen to me a moment, for your children's sake. I desire to stand your friend.'

'And not for my sake--not for the sake of a lonely, misjudged woman?'

'No,' he returned coldly; 'I will confess the truth: it is the best. In our hearts we are not friends, you and I. From the first I have mistrusted you. I have always felt there was something I could not understand. Friends do not have these feelings; but, all the same, I wish to help you.'

'Oh, that is kind; and now I do not mind your hard words.'

'But I must help you in my own way. To-morrow I shall come to you, and you must tell me the whole truth, and whether this man Matthew O'Brien be your husband or not.'

'I tell you--' she began excitedly, but he checked her very gently.

'Hush! Do not speak now; you will make yourself ill again.'

'Oh yes,' she said, falling back on her seat. 'I have palpitations still. I must not excite myself.'

'Just so; and to-morrow you will be calmer and more collected, and you will have made up your mind that the truth will be best because----' he paused, as though not certain how to proceed.

'Because of what?' she asked sharply; and he could detect strained anxiety in her tone.

'Because it will be better for you to tell your story in your own way, far better than for me to hear it from Mr. O'Brien.'

'You would go to him?' and there was unmistakable alarm in her voice.

'Most certainly I would go to him. This is a very important matter to others as well as yourself, Mrs. Blake.'

'I will kill myself,' she said wildly, 'before I tell any such story!

You have no heart, Captain Burnett; you are treating me with refined cruelty; you want to bring me to shame because you hate me, and because----'

But again he checked her:

'Do not exhaust yourself with making all these speeches; you will need all your strength. I will come to you to-morrow evening, and if you will tell me the truth I will promise to help you as far as possible. Surely at such a crisis you will not refuse such help as I may be able to offer you, if only----' he paused, and there was deep feeling in his voice, 'for your children's sake.'

But though he could hear her sob as though in extremity of anguish, she made him no answer, nor could he induce her to speak again until they reached the Gray Cottage, where the fly stopped, and he got out and a.s.sisted her to alight. She kept her face averted from him.

'I will be with you to-morrow,' he repeated, as he touched her hand.

But to this there was no audible reply; she only bowed her head as she pa.s.sed through the gate he held open for her, and disappeared from his sight.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

'I DID NOT LOVE HIM'

'When a man begins to do wrong, he cannot answer for himself how far he may be carried on. He does not see beforehand; he cannot know where he will find himself after the sin is committed. One false step forces him to another.'--NEWMAN.

'An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that if you would succeed you must not be too good.'--EMERSON.

Audrey found Michael strangely uncommunicative that evening; he hardly responded to her expressions of pleasure at seeing him again, and all her questions were answered as briefly as possible. His manner was as kind as ever; indeed, he spoke to her with more than his usual gentleness; but during dinner he seemed to find conversation difficult, and all her little jokes fell flat. She wanted to know how many pretty things he had bought, and if he had put down his name for the proof engraving of a certain picture he had longed to possess.

'Twenty guineas is nothing to you now, Michael,' she observed playfully.

'No, I forgot all about the picture,' he returned, starting up from his chair; 'but I have brought you a present.'

And the next moment he put in her hand a little case. When Audrey opened it, there was a small cross studded with diamonds of great beauty and l.u.s.tre, and the whole effect was so sparkling and dainty that Audrey quite flushed with surprise and pleasure.

'Oh, mother, look how beautiful! But, Michael, how dare you waste your money on me; this must have cost a fortune!' And then she added a little thoughtfully, 'I am afraid Cyril will be sorry when he sees this; he is always lamenting that he cannot give me things.'

'I chose a bracelet for Geraldine,' he returned carelessly, as though buying diamonds were an everyday business with him. 'Would you like to see it?' and he showed her the contents of the other case. 'I have a small offering for my G.o.dson in the shape of the inevitable mug, and I mean to give this to Leonard's mamma.'

'It is very handsome; mother thinks so: don't you, mother? and Gage is devoted to bracelets; but I like mine ever so much better; it is the very perfection of a cross, and I shall value it, ah, so dearly, Michael!' and Audrey held out her hand as she spoke.

Michael pressed it silently. It was little wonder, he thought, that Audrey liked her gift better than Geraldine's; it had cost at least three times as much; in fact, its value had been so great that he had written the cheque with some slight feeling of shame and compunction.

'There is no harm, after all, and she is so fond of diamonds,' he a.s.sured himself, as he put the little case in his pocket; 'she will not know what it cost me, and he will never be able to buy ornaments for her--I may as well give myself this pleasure;' and just for the moment it did please him to see her delight over the ornament.

'It is not so much the diamonds that please me, as Michael's kindness and generosity,' she said to Cyril the next day. 'He has bought nothing for himself, and yet he has been in town a whole month; he only thought of us.'

And Cyril observed quietly, as he closed the case, that it was certainly very kind of Captain Burnett; but a close observer would have said that Michael's generosity had not quite pleased him.

'I suppose you will wear this to-night at the Charringtons'?' he asked presently.

'Yes; and those lovely flowers you have brought me,' she added, with one of her charming smiles; and somehow the cloud pa.s.sed in a moment from the young man's brow.

What did it matter, after all, that he could not give her diamonds? Had he not given himself to her, and did they not belong to each other for time and for eternity? And as he thought this he took her in his arms with a loving speech.

'You are sweet as the very sweetest of my flowers,' he said, holding her close to him. 'You are the very dearest thing in the world to me, Audrey; and sometimes, when I think of the future, I am almost beside myself with happiness.'