“Nor will I, Madge, so long as I live.  I know there is not a lie in you, and I am sure you believe to be true all you tell me, but Dorothy has deceived you by some adroit trick.”

“If she deceived me, she is a witch,” retorted Madge, laughing softly.

“That I am almost ready to believe is the case,” said Sir George.  Dorothy, who was combing her hair at the mirror, laughed softly and said:—­

“My broomstick is under the bed, father.”

Sir George went into Lady Crawford’s room and shut the door, leaving me with the girls.

When her father had left, Dorothy turned upon me with fire in her eyes:—­

“Malcolm Vernon, if you ever lay hands upon me again as you did last night, I will—­I will scratch you.  You pretended to be his friend and mine, but for a cowardly fear of my father you came between us and you carried me to this room by force.  Then you locked the door and—­and”—­

“Did not Madge give you my message?” I asked, interrupting her.

“Yes, but did you not force me away from him when, through my fault, he was almost at death’s door?”

“Have your own way, Dorothy,” I said.  “There lives not, I hope, another woman in the world so unreasoning and perverse as you.”

She tossed her head contemptuously and continued to comb her hair.

“How, suppose you,” I asked, addressing Dorothy’s back, as if I were seeking information, “how, suppose you, the Rutland people learned that John was confined in the Haddon dungeon, and how did they come by the keys?”

The girl turned for a moment, and a light came to her anger-clouded face as the rainbow steals across the blackened sky.

“Malcolm, Malcolm,” she cried, and she ran to me with her bare arms outstretched.

“Did you liberate him?” she asked.  “How did you get the keys?”

“I know nothing of it, Dorothy, nothing,” I replied.

“Swear it, Malcolm, swear it,” she said.

“I will swear to nothing,” I said, unclasping her arms from my neck.

“Then I will kiss you,” she answered, “for you are my dear good brother, and never so long as I live will I again doubt you.”

But she did before long doubt me again, and with good cause.

Dorothy being in a gentle humor; I took advantage of the opportunity to warn her against betraying John’s name to her father.  I also told her to ask her father’s forgiveness, and advised her to feign consent to the Stanley marriage.  Matters had reached a point where some remedy, however desperate, must be applied.