She shook her head and tried to smile. "Oh," she said, trying to suppress her tears, "I ought not to have left him. I daresay you didn't know, but it has done him the most terrible harm. Did you tell him, then, about--about--the thing you told me of, that you had been suspected--of telling something--what was it?" and she passed her hand over her forehead as if unable to think. "No," said Rendel, "I didn't tell him that _I_ had been accused of it. I daresay he guessed I had. I told him it had happened." "But, Frank, why did you?" she said. "I implored you not." "Rachel," he said, "do you realise what it means to me that I should be accused of a thing like this?" "Of course, yes, of course," she said, evidently still listening for any sound from upstairs. "But still a thing like that, that can be put right in a few minutes, cannot matter so much as life and death...." And again her voice became almost inaudible. "There are some things," said Rendel in a low voice, "that matter more to a man than life and death." "Do you mean to say," said Rachel, "that it matters more that you should be supposed to have done something that you have not done, than that my father should not get well?" "Supposing your father had been wrongfully accused of something underhand and dishonourable," said Rendel, "would not that matter more to him than--than--anything else?" Rachel put up her hands with a cry as if to ward off a blow. "My father!" she said, drawing away from Rendel. "You must not say such a thing. How could it be said?" "You endure," said Rendel, "that it should be said about me." "About you! That is different," she said, unable in the tension of her overwrought nerves to choose her words. "You are young, you can defend yourself; but it is cruel, cruel of you to say that it might happen to my father. You don't realise what my father is to me or you couldn't say such things even without meaning them. No, you can't know, you can't understand, or you couldn't, just for your own sake, have gone to him to-day when he is so ill and told him things that excited him." "I think I do understand," Rendel said, forcing himself to speak calmly. "Of course I know, I have always known, perhaps not quite so clearly as to-day, that--that--he must come first with you." "Oh! in some ways he must, he must," Rachel said, half entreatingly, yet with a ring of determination in her voice. "I promised my mother that I would, as far as I could, take her place, and while he lives I must. Frank, I would give up my life to save him suffering, as she would have done. Ah! there is Doctor Morgan," and she left the room hastily as a doctor's brougham stopped at the door.