Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/366

346 “You?” he said hoarsely. “I see now—I see! I might have guessed it long ago!”

“He wanted to do something for me,” she continued in a choking voice; “I let him do that. I deceived him—to save your life. I am here—because I deceived him!”

He thought he had seen everything; he had not, but he was beginning to, now. Good heavens! why was his heart beating so fast? It ought to bleed instead: here was the girl he loved, and upstairs was the man he had reason to love better still; and they were going to marry—like that. He tried to forget, to think only of what Claire had done for him.

“God bless you!” he murmured. “He has saved my life twice over, and much more than my life. And I owe it all to one brave girl who believed in me, and made him believe in me, when all the world—”

“Stop!” she cried. “I never believed in you at all.”

“What?”

“I was—sorry for you.”

“You believed me guilty—even when you tried to save my life?”

“Of manslaughter—yes!”

“Let us split no hairs! You think—I did it—still?”

“I can think nothing else.”

In the dead silence following these words the servant heard his master stamping into evening dress overhead; he felt his own crested buttons glittering in the candle-light that shone upon the table he had set so beautifully for the bride; and, as she tossed back the ringlets that he knew so well, and repeated with unflinching eyes what she had told him in so many candid words, all that had distracted him up to this moment ceased to do