Turlington, wondering, took a chair.  Miss Amelia put the case before her sisters from the sternly conscientious point of view, at the opposite end of the room.

“We have not found out this abominable deception by any underhand means,” she said.  “The discovery has been forced upon us, and we stand pledged to nobody to keep the secret.  Knowing as we do how cruelly this gentleman has been used, it seems to me that we are bound in honor to open his eyes to the truth.  If we remain silent we make ourselves Lady Winwood’s accomplices.  I, for one—­I don’t care what may come of it—­refuse to do that.”

Her sisters agreed with her.  The first chance their clever stepmother had given them of asserting their importance against hers was now in their hands.  Their jealous hatred of Lady Winwood assumed the mask of Duty—­duty toward an outraged and deceived fellow-creature.  Could any earthly motive be purer than that?  “Tell him, Amelia!” cried the two young ladies, with the headlong recklessness of the sex which only stops to think when the time for reflection has gone by.

A vague sense of something wrong began to stir uneasily in Turlington’s mind.

“Don’t let me hurry you,” he said, “but if you really have anything to tell me—­”

Miss Amelia summoned her courage, and began.

“We have something very dreadful to tell you,” she said, interrupting him.  “You have been presented in this house, Mr. Turlington, as a gentleman engaged to marry Lady Winwood’s cousin.  Miss Natalie Graybrooke.”  She paused there—­at the outset of the disclosure.  A sudden change of expression passed over Turlington’s face, which daunted her for the moment.  “We have hitherto understood,” she went on, “that you were to be married to that young lady early in next month.”

“Well?”

He could say that one word.  Looking at their pale faces, and their eager eyes, he could say no more.

“Take care!” whispered Dorothea, in her sister’s ear.  “Look at him, Amelia!  Not too soon.”

Amelia went on more carefully.

“We have just returned from a musical meeting,” she said.  “One of the ladies there was an acquaintance, a former school-fellow of ours.  She is the wife of the rector of St. Columb Major—­a large church, far from this—­at the East End of London.”

“I know nothing about the woman or the church,” interposed Turlington, sternly.

“I must beg you to wait a little.  I can’t tell you what I want to tell you unless I refer to the rector’s wife.  She knows Lady Winwood by name.  And she heard of Lady Winwood recently under very strange circumstances—­circumstances connected with a signature in one of the books of the church.”

Turlington lost his self-control.  “You have got something against my Natalie,” he burst out; “I know it by your whispering, I see it in your looks!  Say it at once in plain words.”

There was no trifling with him now.  In plain words Amelia said it.