“I believed,” she began, in a low, nervous voice, for she knew that there was no evading the questions of Lord Mount Severn, when he was resolute in their being answered, and, indeed she was too weak, both in body and spirit, to resist—­“I believed that his love was no longer mine; that he had deserted me, for another.”

The earl stared at her.  “What can you mean by ‘deserted!’ He was with you.”

“There is a desertion of the heart,” was her murmured answer.

“Desertion of a fiddlestick!” retorted his lordship.  “The interpretation we gave to the note, I and Carlyle, was, that you had been actuated by motives of jealousy; had penned it in a jealous mood.  I put the question to Carlyle—­as between man and man—­do you listen, Isabel!—­whether he had given you cause; and he answered me, as with God over us, he had never given you cause; he had been faithful to you in thought, word and deed; he had never, so far as he could call to mind, even looked upon another woman with covetous feelings, since the hour that he made you his wife; his whole thoughts had been of you, and of you alone.  It is more than many a husband can say,” significantly coughed Lord Mount Severn.

Her pulses were beating wildly.  A powerful conviction that the words were true; that her own blind jealousy had been utterly mistaken and unfounded, was forcing its way to her brain.

“After that I could only set your letter down as a subterfuge,” resumed the earl—­“a false, barefaced plea, put forth to conceal your real motives, and I told Carlyle so.  I inquired how it was he had never detected any secret understanding between you and that—­that beast, located, as the fellow was, in the house.  He replied that no such suspicion had ever occurred to him.  He placed the most implicit confidence in you, and would have trusted you with the creature around the world, aye, with any one else.”

She entwined her hands one within the other, pressing them to pain.  It would not deaden the pain at her heart.

“Carlyle told me he had been unusually occupied during the stay of that man.  Besides his customary office work, his time was taken up with some private business for a family in the neighborhood, and he had repeatedly to see them, more particularly the daughter, after office hours.  Very old acquaintances of his, he said, relatives of the Carlyle family; and he was as anxious about the secret—­a painful one—­as they were.  This, I observed to him, may have rendered him unobservant to what was passing at home.  He told me, I remember, that on the very evening of the—­the catastrophe, he ought to have gone with you to a dinner party, but most important circumstances arose, in connection with the affair, which obliged him to meet two gentlemen at his office, and to receive them in secret, unknown to his clerks.”

“Did he mention the name of the family?” inquired Lady Isabel, with white lips.

“Yes, he did.  I forgot it, though.  Rabbit!  Rabit!—­some such name as that.”