“What have you done with Jane?” she was about to say: but then it appeared to her that Jane must have escaped, that everything was accomplished. She could have wept or laughed in the extreme blessedness of this relief, but she dared not do either. She looked at him instead, as he sat looking suspiciously at her. “It made me very anxious to hear of your going,” she said. “I feared something might be wrong. I am going back directly, and nobody knows I am out of my room: but I felt that I must hear----” “What?” he asked with watchful suspicion; it was a terrible ordeal to go through. The Duchess did all a woman could to take the meaning out of her own face and put upon it an aspect of affectionate concern alone. “I did not know what to think,” she said; “I was very anxious: but it cannot be anything very bad, I hope, since I find you----” How hard it is to say what is not the truth! While she uttered these commonplace words her eyes were watching him, keenly questioning everything about him. At last her heart seemed to stand still. She perceived the two covers laid on the table. “You have some one with you,” she said, with a catching of her breath. He looked at her still more keenly. “I have Jane with me,” he said. “Jane!” It was all her mother could do not to break down altogether, and show her anguish and disappointment in passionate tears; but her heart was leaping in her throat, and she could not speak. “That is to say,” he added slowly, with unspeakable enjoyment in the sense of having got the better of the women altogether, and holding them in his hand, “she is in the house. I arrived in time to save her from becoming the victim--of a villain. I shall keep her safe now I have got her,” the Duke said, with an ineffable flourish of his hand. “The victim--of a villain? What do you mean by such words? They sound as if you had got them out of a novel,” the Duchess said; but her heart was beating so that she could scarcely hear herself speak. “Then you knew nothing about it?” said her husband calmly. The Duchess got up from her seat. She was too much agitated to be able to keep still. “I knew, if that is what you mean, that she was to marry--the man she loved--to-day. What have you done? Have you parted your own child from her happiness and her life?” He rose too. He had kept up his calm demeanour as long as he could. Now his rage got the better of him. “So you were in the plot!” he cried, “you! I felt it, and yet I could not believe it. You who ought to have been the first to carry out my will and respect my decision.” “Augustus,” said his wife, very pale, standing up before him, her hand upon the back of a tall chair, her head erect, “this must not go too far. Jane has not one but two parents, and she has always had her mother’s sanction. You are aware of that.”