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Lady Elfrida's health was toasted by the gallant colonel in a speech that was the soul of chivalry.
Then I saw also that a rent in my tunic, made when my horse fell, had been carefully mended, and that no speck of the dust and mire I had gathered on my garments from collar to hose was left. All had been tended as carefully as if I had been at home, and I saw Elfrida's little brooch shining where I had pinned it.
She told her story unexcitedly; it was evident that she had not been frightened, but Lady Runnybroke noticed that there was a shade of anxious abstraction in her face. When the officers were alone the colonel took hurried counsel of them. "I think," said Captain Fleetwood, "that Lady Elfrida's story quite explains itself.
His train was not large, and those were days in which an angry or jealous thane would not hesitate to lift his hand against a king. He, therefore, affected not to be struck with Elfrida's beauty, was gracious as usual to his host, and seemed the most agreeable of guests. But passion was burning in his heart, the double passion of love and revenge.
We shall get there first, if we run our hardest," Elfrida's father said. And he ran, with his little daughter's hand in his. They got there first. The stream, knowing its own mind better and better as it recognized its old road, reached the Castle, and by dinner-time all the grass round the Castle was under water.
Thus ended Elfrida's darkened life; nor did it seem an unfit end; for it was as if she had fallen into the arms of the maiden who had in her thoughts become one with the stream the saintly Editha through whose sacrifice and intercession she had been saved from death everlasting.
When that lady had visited them at Nahant, she had considered her the embodiment of all the female virtues. She recalled her statuesque repose, and her aristocratic manner which had so pleased her father. She also remembered the morning when she was discovered by Maude practising the Lady Elfrida's poses, and her sister's inquiry as to whether she had a chill and wanted the quinine pills.
And the days went on, and lessons with Mr. Parados were a sort of Inquisition torture to Dickie. For the tutor never let a day pass without trying to find out whether Dickie had shared in any way that guilty knowledge of Elfrida's which had, so Mr. Parados insisted, overthrown the fell plot of the Papists and preserved to a loyal people His Most Gracious Majesty James the First.
But he was not offended with them, since they knew nothing of his and Athelwold's secret, and what they thought and felt about his friend was nothing to him. But these fatal words about Elfrida's beauty had pierced him with a sudden suspicion of his friend's treachery. And Athelwold was the man he greatly loved the companion of all his years since their boyhood together.
One of my literary friends, who has looked at the Dead Man's Plack in manuscript, has said by way of criticism that Elfrida's character is veiled. I am not to blame for that; for have I not already said, by implication at all events, in the Preamble, that my knowledge of her comes from outside.
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