"Not yet," said Diana grimly.
"Not yet?"
"He sups to-night at Mr. Newlington's," Miss Horton exclaimed in a voice pregnant with meaning.
"Ah!" It was a cry from Ruth, sharp as if she had been stabbed. She sank back to her seat by the window, smitten down by this sudden news.
There was a pause, which fretted Diana, who now craved knowledge of what might be passing in her cousin's mind. She advanced towards Ruth and laid a trembling hand on her shoulder, where the white gown met the ivory neck. "He must be warned," she said.
"But.., but how?" stammered Ruth. "To warn him were to betray Sir Rowland."
"Sir Rowland?" cried Diana in high scorn.
"And... and Richard," Ruth continued.
"Yes, and Mr. Newlington, and all the other knaves that are engaged in this murderous business. Well?" she demanded. "Will you do it, or must I?"
"Do it?" Ruth's eyes sought her cousin's white, excited face in the quasi-darkness. "But have you thought of what it will mean? Have you thought of the poor people that will perish unless the Duke is taken and this rebellion brought to an end?"
"Thought of it?" repeated Diana witheringly. "Not I. I have thought that Mr. Wilding is here and like to have his throat cut before an hour is past."
"Tell me, are you sure of this?" asked Ruth.
"I have it from your husband's own lips," Diana answered, and told her in a few words of her meeting with Mr. Wilding.
Ruth sat with hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the dim violet after-glow in the west, and her mind wrestling with this problem that Diana had brought her.
"Diana," she cried at last, "what am I to do?"
"Do?" echoed Diana. "Is it not plain? Warn Mr. Wilding."
"But Richard?"
"Mr. Wilding saved Richard's life..."
"I know. I know. My duty is to warn him."
"Then why hesitate?"
"My duty is also to keep faith with Richard, to think of those poor misguided folk who are to be saved by this," cried Ruth in an agony. "If Mr. Wildin is warned, they will all be ruined."
Diana stamped her foot impatiently. "Had I thought to find you in this mind, I had warned him myself;" said she.
"Ah! Why did you not?"
"That the chance of doing so might be yours. That you might thus repay him the debt in which you stand."
"Diana, I can't!" The words broke from her in a sob.
But whatever her interest in Mr. Wilding for her own sake, Diana's prime intent was the thwarting Sir Rowland Blake. If Wilding were warned of what manner of feast was spread at Newlington's, Sir Rowland would be indeed undone.