“But neither you nor I own the truth.  This belongs to Dalhousie....”

“Oh, it doesn’t!—­it doesn’t!  How can you!  You misunderstand!—­What I said to you gave you a totally wrong impression.  He was entirely to blame for my upsetting. Entirely! He behaved abominably—­and I—­”

“Tell now!” cried the man, with his strange stern passion.  “Once it’s done, you’ll always be glad.  Don’t you know you must, now!  Don’t you see you can’t be happy, till you let the truth be known?...”

There came from above the unmistakable movement of chairs, the sound of many feet.  It appeared that the Settlement meeting was breaking up.  The man’s entreaties bounded back dead.

“I couldn’t!—­Don’t you understand?  There’s nothing to tell.  It was not my fault.  The story was distorted, distorted, and distorted!  I regretted that as much as any one.  But I could do nothing, nothing to stop it.  And don’t you understand I couldn’t possibly tell this broadcast now, when it’s been done with for months! What would people think of me?  Don’t you—­”

“What will you have to think of yourself if you don’t tell?”

But the hard shot missed fire, the reason being that what she thought of herself did not matter in the least just now.  She was mamma’s daughter, Hugo Canning’s betrothed, fighting for her own:  and now that movement upstairs warned her that she had no moment to lose.

Carlisle seized the slum doctor’s arm with a resolute little hand.  Her voice, though panicky, was as inexorable as mamma’s own.

“Promise me,” said she, “that you will never repeat to anybody what I told you in confidence.”

The face of the young man, which was usually so harmless-looking, had suddenly become quite stern.  He looked as if he might ask God to pity her again, given a very little more.  When he spoke, he spoke brusquely: 

“What you ask is a conspiracy of silence.  I cannot make such a promise.  I cannot.”

“Oh, how can you be so hard!  You’ve never meant anything but trouble to me since the first minute I saw you!  It isn’t fair, don’t you see it isn’t?  This has happened so suddenly—­I must have time to think.  Promise that you won’t say anything—­at least till you hear from me again....”

Silence.  And then V. Vivian said, in a suddenly hopeless voice: 

“I will agree to say nothing without first seeing you....”

Cally Heth dropped his arm instantly, turned from him.  She fled, not up the grand stairway, but over the court for the doors, with the protecting arms of the House of Heth beyond.  And none of her other routs from the family enemy had been quite like this one.

     XVIII