Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/42



Jay closed the door and confronted his father. "You've heard," he said. It was plain; plain, too, that his father believed what had been reported to him. For a few seconds, Jay felt sick. He would not have minded, so much, his father believing him when he accused himself; but already his father had condemned him on the word of another.

Jay turned against the lie in himself; he wanted to cry out against it to his father; he wanted to clear himself of it as of nothing else in all his life. But what had he wired to Lida just now? "Be glad. I am." It meant he was going through with it; going through! So he stared at his father and took it.

"I have heard," said his father, "quite fully."

"Yes," said Jay, "I suppose so"; and his mind set to working. What had his father heard? He knew, in general, with what he had been charged; but with what special circumstances had it been related?

He realized that Lida and he yesterday should have agreed upon details implicating him, instead of Nucast. They had not, because she had denied, yesterday, that she would permit him to take this upon himself.

So Jay asked, because he had to ask: "What have you heard, father?" And he saw this strike his father as an effort of concealment. His father refused to reply and turned to Ellen Powell. "Where are those telegrams about him?"