"I am going for her, mother. Remember she is friendless, and that she saved your son's life."
He quitted the room with the last word. That claim, he knew, was one his mother would never repudiate.
"Oh!" she said, lying back in her chair pale and faint, "to think what might have happened!"
As she spoke her son re-entered the room, and by his side a young lady--so stately, so majestic in her dark beauty, that involuntarily the mother and daughter arose.
"My mother, this young lady saved my life. Try and thank her for me. Lady Kingsland, Miss Silver."
Surely some subtle power of fascination invested this dark daughter of the earth. The liquid dark eyes lifted themselves in mute appeal to the great lady's face, and then the proudest woman in England opened her arms with a sudden impulse and took the outcast to her bosom.
"I can never thank you," she murmured. "The service you have rendered me is beyond all words."
An hour later Sybilla went slowly back to her room. She had breakfasted tête-à-tête with my lady and her daughter, while Sir Everard, in scarlet coat and cord and tops, had mounted his bonny bay and ridden off to Lady Louise and the fox-hunt, and to his fate, though he knew it not.
"Really, Mildred," my lady said, "a most delightful young person, truly. Do you know, if she does not succeed in finding her friends I should like to retain her as a companion?"
In her own room Sybilla Silver stood before the glass, and she smiled back at her own image.
"So, my lady," she said, "you walk into the trap with your eyes open, too--you who are old enough to know better? My handsome face and black eyes and smooth tongue stand me in their usual good stead. And I saved Sir Everard Kingsland's life! Poor fools! A thousand times better for you all if I had let that midnight assassin shoot him down like a dog!"