"Why, Una dear," cried Miss Armytage, kneeling beside her and putting a motherly arm about that full-grown child, "what is this?"
Her ladyship wept copiously, the springs of her grief gushing forth in response to that sympathetic touch.
"Oh, my dear, I am so distressed. I shall go mad, I think. I am sure I have never deserved all this trouble. I have always been considerate of others. You know I wouldn't give pain to any one.
And - and **** has always been so thoughtless."
"****?" said Miss Armytage, and there was less sympathy in her voice. "It is **** you are thinking about at present?"
"Of course. All this trouble has come through ****. I mean," she recovered, "that all my troubles began with this affair of ****'s. And now there is Ned under arrest and to be court-martialled."
"But what has Captain Tremayne to do with ****? "
"Nothing, of course," her ladyship agreed, with more than usual self-restraint. "But it's one trouble on another. Oh, it's more than I can bear."
"I know, my dear, I know," Miss Armytage said soothingly, and her own voice was not so steady.
"You don't know! How can you? It isn't your brother or your friend. It isn't as if you cared very much for either of them.
If you did, if you loved **** or Ned, you might realise what I am suffering."
Miss Armytage's eyes looked straight ahead into the thick green foliage, and there was an odd smile, half wistful, half scornful, on her lips.
"Yet I have done what I could," she said presently. "I have spoken to Lord Wellington about them both."
Lady O'Moy checked her tears to look at her companion, and there was dread in her eyes.
"You have spoken to Lord Wellington?"
"Yes. The opportunity came, and I took it."
"And whatever did you tell him?" She was all a-tremble now, as she clutched Miss Armytage's hand.
Miss Armytage related what had passed; how she had explained the true facts of ****'s case to his lordship; how she had protested her faith that Tremayne was incapable of lying, and that if he said he had not killed Samoval it was certain that he had not done so; and, finally, how his lordship had promised to bear both cases in his mind.
"That doesn't seem very much," her ladyship complained.
"But he said that he would never allow a British officer to be made a scapegoat, and that if things proved to be as I stated them he would see that the worst that happened to **** would be his dismissal from the army. He asked me to let him know immediately if **** were found."
More than ever was her ladyship on the very edge of confiding.
A chance word might have broken down the last barrier of her will.
But that word was not spoken, and so she was given the opportunity of first consulting her brother.
He laughed when he heard the story.
"A trap to take me, that's all," he pronounced it. "My dear girl, that stiff-necked martinet knows nothing of forgiveness for a military offence. Discipline is the god at whose shrine he worships."
And he afforded her anecdotes to illustrate and confirm his assertion of Lord Wellington's ruthlessness. "I tell you," he concluded, "it's nothing but a trap to catch me. And if you had been fool enough to yield, and to have blabbed of my presence to Sylvia, you would have had it proved to you."
She was terrified and of course convinced, for she was easy of conviction, believing always the last person to whom she spoke. She sat down on one of the boxes that furnished that cheerless refuge of Mr. Butler's.
