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On arrival in London, Robert Audley received a letter from Clara Talboys saying that Luke Marks, the man whom he had saved in the fire at the Castle Inn, was lying at his mother's cottage at Audley, and expressed a very earnest wish to see him. Robert took train at once to Audley.
The first sounds she there heard were, "Sir, I have given my faith to the Lady Eleanor of Audley, whom I love." "What is that to me? 'Twas a precontract to my daughter." "Not made by me nor her." "By your parents, with myself. You went near to being her death outright, marred her face for life, so that none other will wed her. What say you? Not hurt by your own will? Who said it was?
"I do not excuse him his rivalship, nor his first concealment of it. But believe me, since then, his genuine remorse, his anxious tenderness for your welfare, his dread of losing your friendship " "Stop! It was doubtless Audley Egerton who induced you yourself to conceal what you call his 'relations' with her whom I can now so calmly name, Leonora Avenel?"
She shook out her hair into feathery showers of glittering gold, and, with a cloak of white cashmere about her shoulders, went down-stairs into the vestibule. She opened the door of the library and looked in. Sir Michael Audley was asleep in his easy-chair. As my lady softly closed this door Alicia descended the stairs from her own room.
I have secured an ally in a young Austrian prince, who is now in London, and who has promised to back, with all his influence, a memorial I shall transmit to Vienna. a propos, my dear Audley, now that you have a little breathing-time, you must fix an hour for me to present to you my young poet, the son of her sister. At moments the expression of his face is so like hers."
I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring at one paragraph among the list of deaths, before his dazed brain took in its full meaning; but after considerable pause he pushed the newspaper over to Robert Audley, and with a face that had changed from its dark bronze to a sickly, chalky grayish white, and with an awful calmness in his manner, he pointed with his finger to a line which ran thus: "On the 24th inst., at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys, aged 22."
The dearest and most intimate friend of Audley Egerton was Lord L'Estrange, from whom he had been inseparable at Eton, and who now, if Audley Egerton was the fashion, was absolutely the rage in London. Harley, Lord L'Estrange, was the only son of the Earl of Lansmere, a nobleman of considerable wealth, and allied, by intermarriages, to the loftiest and most powerful families in England.
These lines were written in a hand that Robert Audley knew only too well. He sat for a long time pondering silently over the letter written by Helen Talboys. What was the meaning of those two last sentences "You should forgive me, for you know why I have been so. You know the secret which is the key to my life?"
Lord Audley of Cheshire, the hero of Poictiers, and Loring of Hampshire, who was held to be the second lance in the army, were easily fixed upon. Then, of the younger men, Sir Thomas Percy of Northumberland, Sir Thomas Wake of Yorkshire, and Sir William Beauchamp of Gloucestershire, were finally selected to uphold the honor of England.
George Talboys, for the stranger was the late passenger on board the Argus, had been from boyhood the inseparable chum of Robert Audley. The tale of Talboys' marriage, his expedition to Australia, and his return with a fortune, was briefly told. The pair took a hansom to the Westminster coffee-house where Talboys had written to his wife to forward letters.
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