Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/314

 "When we got to the Tower she looked horribly tired. I never saw her look so tired, but she said it was the heat, and she would be better after she had told me everything. She sat down on a seat—a seat made out of a log, and I stood close by. Neither of us dreamed that there was any one in the Tower, yet there—in the upper room, we now know, lay Liane asleep. And in the room on the first floor were Barr and Nora Verney."

"Ian! They were there!"

"Yes. Nora told me at St. Pierre that she and Barr had heard everything. That is why he left England, rather than bear witness against me; for there's just one thing they don't know. They didn't see me go away. They think I—but I have not come to that part yet. You see, it s hard to put all this straightforwardly and connectedly, as if into paragraphs."

"Go on from the time when Milly began to tell you her story."

"That's the hardest of all. She—well, to make it as brief as I can, Terry—she confessed then and there, that she'd lied to me when I first knew her in England—lied most hideously—about you. She started by saying she wouldn't have the courage to confess, even now, after all these years, if she weren't afraid that I might find out the truth in a way worse for her than telling it with her own lips. In other words, she feared it might come to me through you.