"His mind must be disabused at once," he answered. "I must go to
him."

O'Moy had already vanished.

There were one or two others would have checked the adjutant's
departure, but he had heeded none. In the quadrangle he nodded
curtly to Colonel Grant, who would have detained him. But he
passed on and went to shut himself up in his study with his mental
anguish that was compounded of so many and so diverse emotions.
He needed above all things to be alone and to think, if thought were
possible to a mind so distraught as his own. There were now so many
things to be faced, considered, and dealt with. First and foremost
- and this was perhaps the product of inevitable reaction - was the
consideration of his own duplicity, his villainous betrayal of trust
undertaken deliberately, but with an aim very different from that
which would appear. He perceived how men must assume now, when
the truth of Samoval's death became known as become known it must
- that he had deliberately fastened upon another his own crime. The
fine edifice of vengeance he had been so skilfully erecting had
toppled about his ears in obscene ruin, and he was a man not only
broken, but dishonoured. Let him proclaim the truth now and none
would believe it. Sylvia Armytage's mad and inexplicable
self-accusation was a final bar to that. Men of honour would scorn
him, his friends would turn from him in disgust, and Wellington, that
great soldier whom he worshipped, and whose esteem he valued above
all possessions, would be the first to cast him out. He would appear
as a vulgar murderer who, having failed by falsehood to fasten the
guilt upon an innocent man, sought now by falsehood still more