“Well, Papa should still testify. He’ll look guilty if he doesn’t. You’ve said that often to me. It seems to them like running away. If they hear him, see him, they’ll know what kind of a man he is, and that the whole charge is ridiculous. It’s Monk trying to make a name for himself. He probably knows he’s wrong by now, but he daren’t back out of it or he’ll look a fool.”

Rathbone felt as if a nightmare were tightening its coils around him. “Margaret, did you go to Hattie Benson in the clinic, take her to the street door, and persuade her to leave?”

There were two spots of color in Margaret’s face. She lifted her chin a little higher. “She was going to lie about Rupert Cardew, and Hester would have seen that she went through with it. If you think I could allow my father to be hanged for something he didn’t do, then you have no idea of either love or loyalty.”

“Love doesn’t mean betraying what you believe in, Margaret, and no one who truly loved you would ask it,” he replied, his voice trembling.

She closed her eyes. “You pompous fool!” she said between her teeth. “Love means caring, passionately. It means sacrificing yourself for another person because they are more important to you than your career or your ambition, or the way other people admire you, or your money, or even your own life!” Her voice was shaking. “But you wouldn’t understand that. You like, you want, perhaps at times you can need, but you don’t love! You’re a cold, pious, self-righteous man. You don’t want a wife; you want someone to hold on your arm at parties, and organize your household for you.”

Rathbone felt as if she had struck him. He tried to think clearly, find the reason, the balance, but all that filled his mind was crippling emotion. Hester’s words rang in his ears, but he knew even trying to repeat them to Margaret would be useless. And they would sound like Hester, which would make matters even worse.

He should leave, now before he said something that he could never take back.

But as he stood on the outside step again, he was at a loss to know of anything that could have made it worse.

HE TOOK A HANSOM and rode in it all the way to Primrose Hill, not even considering the possibility that his father might be out. Only as the cab set him down on the pavement and he fished in his pocket for the money to pay the driver did he think of it. It was a mild Saturday afternoon. Why should Henry Rathbone be at home when there were a hundred other things to do, friends to visit?