“Well, at the worst,” she said, “men, as I have known them, are men. He has been shut up for a long while with that minx, who is very fair and witching, and it was scarcely right to watch him through a slit in a tower. If he were my lover, I should say nothing about it.” “I will say nothing to him about that or any other matter,” replied Margaret sternly. “I have done with Peter Brome.” Again Betty thought, and spoke. “I seem to see a trick. Cousin Margaret, they told you he was dead, did they not? And then that news came to us that he was not dead, only sick, and here. So the lie failed. Now they tell you, and seem to show you, that he is faithless. May not all this have been some part played for a purpose by the woman?” “It takes two to play such parts, Betty. If you had seen——” “If I had seen, I should have known whether it was but a part or love made in good earnest; but you are too innocent to judge. What said the marquis all this while, and the priest?” “Little or nothing, only smiled at each other, and at length, when it grew dark and we could see no more, asked me if I did not think that it was time to go—me! whom they had kept there all that while to be the witness of my own shame.” “Yes, they kept you there—did they not?—and brought you there just at the right time—did they not?—and shut me out of the tower so that I might not be with you—oh! and all the rest. Now, if you have any justice in you, Cousin, you will hear Peter’s side of this story before you judge him.” “I have judged him,” answered Margaret coldly, “and, oh! I wish that I were dead.” Margaret rose from her seat and, stepping to the window-place in the tower which was built upon the edge of a hill, searched the giddy depth beneath with her eyes, where, two hundred feet below, the white line of a roadway showed faintly in the moonlight. “It would be easy, would it not,” she said, with a strained laugh, “just to lean out a little too far upon this stone, and then one swift rush and darkness—or light—for ever—which, I wonder?” “Light, I think,” said Betty, jerking her back from the window—“the light of hell fire, and plenty of it, for that would be self-murder, nothing else, and besides, what would one look like on that road? Cousin, don’t be a fool. If you are right, it isn’t you who ought to go out of that window; and if you are wrong, then you would only make a bad business worse. Time enough to die when one must, say I—which, perhaps, will be soon enough. Meanwhile, if I were you, I would try to speak to Master Peter first, if only to let him know what I thought of him.” “Mayhap,” answered Margaret, sinking back into a chair, “but I suffer—how can you know what I suffer?”