“I am sure he will. I can almost pledge my word on it. Marcus would do anything to serve me. Oh, set your mind at rest. Consider the thing done. Keep Dick safely hidden for a week or so until the Telemachus is ready to sail--he mustn’t go on board until the last moment, for several reasons--and I will see to the rest.” Under that confident promise her troubles fell from her, as lightly as they ever did. “You are very good to me, Ned. Forgive me what I said just now. And I think I understand about Terence--poor dear old Terence.” “Of course you do.” Moved to comfort her as he might have been moved to comfort a child, he flung his arm along the seat behind her, and patted her shoulder soothingly. “I knew you would understand. And not a word to Terence, not a word that could so much as awaken his suspicions. Remember that.” “Oh, I shall.” Fell a step upon the patch behind them crunching the gravel. Captain Tremayne, his arm still along the back of the seat, and seeming to envelop her ladyship, looked over her shoulder. A tall figure was advancing briskly. He recognised it even in the gloom by its height and gait and swing for O’Moy’s. “Why, here is Terence,” he said easily--so easily, with such frank and obvious honesty of welcome, that the anger in which O’Moy came wrapped fell from him on the instant, to be replaced by shame. “I have been looking for you everywhere, my dear,” he said to Una. “Marshal Beresford is anxious to pay you his respects before he leaves, and you have been so hedged about by gallants all the evening that it’s devil a chance he’s had of approaching you.” There was a certain constraint in his voice, for a man may not recover instantly from such feelings as those which had fetched him hot-foot down that path at sight of those two figures sitting so close and intimate, the young man’s arm so proprietorialy about the lady’s shoulders--as it seemed. Lady O’Moy sprang up at once, with a little silvery laugh that was singularly care-free; for had not Tremayne lifted the burden entirely from her shoulders? “You should have married a dowd,” she mocked him. “Then you’d have found her more easily accessible.” “Instead of finding her dallying in the moonlight with my secretary,” he rallied back between good and ill humour. And he turned to Tremayne: “Damned indiscreet of you, Ned,” he added more severely. “Suppose you had been seen by any of the scandalmongering old wives of the garrison? A nice thing for Una and a nice thing for me, begad, to be made the subject of fly-blown talk over the tea-cups.” Tremayne accepted the rebuke in the friendly spirit in which it appeared to be conveyed. “Sorry, O’Moy,” he said. “You’re quite right. We should have thought of it. Everybody isn’t to know what our relations are.” And again he was so manifestly honest and so completely at his ease that it was impossible to harbour any thought of evil, and O’Moy felt again the glow of shame of suspicions so utterly unworthy and dishonouring.