Emily blushed to her ears with embarrassment.  He did not believe her.

“But I am really,” she protested.  “I really am.  I was married last year.  I was Emily Fox-Seton.  Perhaps you remember.”

She was not flighty or indignant.  Her frank face was only a little more troubled than it had been before.  She looked straight into his eyes without a doubt of his presently believing her.  Good heavens! if—­

She walked to the writing-table and picked up a number of letters.  They were all stamped with the same seal.  She brought them to him almost composedly.

“I ought to have remembered how strange it would sound,” she said in her amenable voice.  “I hope I am not doing wrong in speaking.  I hope you won’t mind my troubling you.  It seemed as if I couldn’t bear it alone any longer.”

After which she told him her story.

* * * * *

The unadorned straightforwardness of the relation made it an amazing thing to hear, even more amazing than it would have been made by a more imaginative handling.  Her obvious inability to cope with the unusual and villainous, combined with her entire willingness to obliterate herself in any manner in her whole-souled tenderness for the one present object of her existence, were things a man could not be unmoved by, even though experience led him to smile at the lack of knowledge of the world which had left her without practical defence.  Her very humbleness and candour made her a drama in herself.

“Perhaps I was wrong to run away.  Perhaps only a silly woman would have done such a queer, unconventional thing.  But I could think of nothing else so likely to be quite safe, until Lord Walderhurst could advise me.  And when his letter came yesterday, and he did not speak of what I had said—­” Her voice quite failed her.

“Captain Osborn has detained your letter.  Lord Walderhurst has not seen it.”

Life began to come back to her.  She had been so horribly bewildered as to think at moments that perhaps it might be that a man who was very much absorbed in affairs—­

“The information you sent him is the most important, and moving, a man in his position could receive.”

“Do you think so, really?” She lifted her head with new courage and her colour returned.

“It is impossible that it should be otherwise.  It is, I assure you, impossible, Lady Walderhurst.”

“I am so thankful,” she said devoutly.  “I am so thankful that I have told you.”

Anything more touching and attractive than her full eyes and her grown-up child’s smile he felt he had never seen.

Chapter Twenty two