Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/237

 "There's probably no real danger. Still, I don't like it," said Terry.

"Neither do I like it," answered the girl. "But it's a choice between evils. And it's too late to change. Ian must have had my note a long time, and he may not be in his hotel. I shall have to go, you see."

"I suppose so," agreed Terry.

"Have I abused your kindness?" asked Nora, looking so lovely and so miserable that Terry's heart melted completely.

She had been caught by the romance of the strange plan the girl had proposed. And because her own first and last love had been broken abruptly and cruelly, when she was about Nora Verney's age, her sympathy with Nora in her tragic separation from her lover was almost morbidly intense. Terry had not received many confidences from the young girl; but she had been told that Nora was forced to part from Ian Barr; that their engagement had never been ended, nevertheless; that they had hoped to marry some day, "until that dreadful murder changed everything." With tears, and hands that clung to Terry's, the girl had sworn her certainty of Ian Barr's innocence. "All his motives in everything he had done were the noblest and bravest, and most unselfish," she had sobbed to her friend. "Because he is noble and unselfish, both our lives may be ruined, his and mine.