I _did_ love you, Eagle. I truly did, only--I
was a coward. I was deceived, as other people were deceived. And I had
Father to think of as well as myself."

"Don't excuse yourself to me, I beg! All that is past and done with. You
didn't come here I'm sure to----"

"Ah! If the past could be done with! It can't, and that is why I have
come. I know Peggy has been with you. It's useless to tell me she has
not."

"I've no intention of telling you a lie, Lady Diana."

Di broke down, and cried without any effort to restrain herself. She did
not look quite her beautiful self when she cried, but she looked a
hundred times more pathetic. "You won't believe me, I suppose," she
sobbed, "but till to-night I never knew--knew that Sidney had deceived
me. I believed what he told me to believe. It is an awful blow! I
think--my heart is broken. But, oh, God, Eagle, if you ruin him before
the world it will be my death!"

To my astonishment Eagle answered with a laugh--a laugh of exceeding
bitterness.

"You seem to believe and disbelieve easily, Lady Diana Vandyke!" he
said. "Once you believed in me. Then you ceased to believe in me and
threw me over because another man--a richer man than I--told you and
everybody else that I was a liar. You believed in him instead--on his
mere word. You married him. May I ask if he has confessed to you, or do
you take his guilt for granted as you took mine, on circumstantial
evidence?"

"No, he has not confessed anything," Di answered. Yet there was
something in her tone and confused, anxious manner that made me sure she
was not telling the truth. The conviction swept over me that something
had happened at the house in Park Lane since I slammed the front door
and ran out. Diana might have thought twice before coming to grovel here
to Eagle, unless she had been sure that I was not jumping to
conclusions--sure that there could be no possible mistake about _what I
had found in Sidney's coat_. Suddenly I knew as well as if she had put
the story into words that Sidney had come home before she had made up
her mind what to do; that she had told him about the coat, and that I
had carried it off to Eagle March; that Sidney, knowing well what my
discovery must have been, had broken down and sent Diana to Eagle, in
the one last hope that her pleading might save him from his enemy's
revenge.

"I haven't seen Sidney," she hurried on. "But--instinct tells me some
things. I'm afraid--I know that his loving m