It
was in the tea-room behind, where the light refreshments were laid
out before supper. She spoke low and seriously.
"Cyril," she said, in a tone of absolute confidence--they were
not engaged, of course, but still, it had got to plain "Cyril" and
"Elma" by this time--"I'm surer of it than ever, no matter what you
say. Guy's perfectly innocent. I know it as certainly as I know my
own name. I can't be mistaken. And the man who really did it is,
as I told you, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve."
"My dear child," Cyril answered--you call the girl you are in love
with "my dear child," when you mean to differ from her, with an
air of masculine superiority--"how on earth can that be, when, as
I told you, I have Guy's confession in writing, under his own very
hand, that he really did it?"
"I don't care a pin for that," Elma cried, with a true woman's
contempt for anything so unimportant as mere positive evidence.
"Perhaps Sir Gilbert made him do it somehow--compelled him, or
coerced him, or willed him, or something--I don't understand these
new notions--or perhaps he got him into a scrape and then hadn't
the courage or the manliness to get him out of it. But at any rate,
I can answer for one thing, I were to go to the stake for it--Sir
Gilbert Gildersleeve is the man who's really guilty.
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