Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/246

 The girl's eyes blazed. "You ask me—me—what you can do for him? Oh!"

"I don t understand you," Sir Ian said more coldly. "You have conceived a great horror of me. I quite see that. But if there is something I can do, you had better restrain your dislike enough to tell me clearly what it is."

"You know what you can do," Nora answered. "You can save Ian."

"I tried to do what I could that first day at the inquest, when—"

"You call that 'doing all you could,' when you know he is innocent—when you know who is guilty?"

Sir Ian turned on her in surprise tinged at last with anger, for she flung insult in his face, with tone and words.

"If you will have it," he retorted, "I do not know that Ian Barr is innocent."

"How dare you?" she cried, aghast. "You make me forget my promise to Ian. Now I know you don't mean to help, perhaps I shall be driven to break it to all the world. He will never forgive me—but at least I shall have saved him; and if I kill myself, what will the rest matter? Sir Ian Hereward, I warn you, if you try to harm instead of help your cousin, who gives himself for you, I will tell everything, in spite of my promise."