"No, I don't think she would refuse. She was very good to me. But why am I to go back to London?"
"Because to stay here would be ruin and disgrace to you; because the tie that links you to Horatio Paget must be cut at any hazard."
"For the best or worst of reasons. Your father has been trying a trick to-night which has been hitherto so infallible, that I suppose he had grown careless as to his execution of it. Or perhaps he took a false measure of the man he was playing with. In any case, he has been found out, and has been arrested by the police."
"Arrested, for cheating at cards!" exclaimed the girl, with a look of unspeakable disgust and horror. Valentine's arm was ready to support her, if she had shown any symptom of fainting; but she did not. She stood erect before him, very pale but firm as a rock.
"Yes, I want you to disappear from this place before you become notorious as your father's daughter. That would be about the worst reputation which you could carry through life. Believe me that I wish you well, Diana, and be ruled by me."
"I will," she answered, with a kind of despairing resignation. "It seems very dreary to go back to England to face the world all alone. But I will do as you tell me."
She did not express any sympathy for her father, then languishing under arrest, whereby she proved herself very wicked and unwomanly, no doubt. But neither womanly virtues nor Christian graces are wont to flourish in the school in which Diana Paget had been reared. She obeyed Valentine Hawkehurst to the letter, without any sentimental lamentations whatever. Her scanty possessions were collected, and neatly packed, in little more than an hour. At three o'clock she lay down in her tawdry little bed-chamber to take what rest she might in the space of two hours. At six she stood by Valentine Hawkehurst on the platform of the railway station, with her face hidden by a brown gauze veil, waiting till the train was made ready to start.
It was after she was seated in the carriage that she spoke for the first time of her father.
"Is it likely to go very hard with him?" she asked.
"I hope not. We must try to pull him through it as well as we can. The charge may break down at the first examination. Good bye."