Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/391

Rh cruel wrong she had done the man before her, the sufferings cut so deep upon his bronzed face, and her own new and blinding realisation of his innocence and heroism. For a space she could but stand and gaze upon him with burning eye-balls; then, with the noble unconsciousness of a woman stirred to the soul, she took him by both hands, and drew him into the room, and besought his forgiveness upon her knees, but with his hands still clasped in hers.

Tom released his hands, shut the door nervously, and then almost brusquely asked her what he had to forgive.

“I thought you guilty,” she sobbed. “I said so—and you were innocent all the time! Oh, thank God—”

“Wait,” he interrupted. “How do you know that?”

“What you lost I found. I have it here. Oh, Tom, I have read every word! Oh, why did you not send it at the time? You were innocent—innocent! Can you ever forgive me?”

“Get up,” he said. “You have forgotten something.”

“Nothing,” she answered. “Your marriage has no more to do with it than mine.”

“My marriage! With whom, pray?”

“The wife you applied for—at some factory!”

She could not help her tone: it stung Tom into telling her the facts, and so inadvertently exposing Daintree’s chicanery. He instantly defended it as the accepted course.

“But that’s not what I meant at all,” he added hurriedly. “You must have forgotten what I told you the other day in the boat-shed!”

Claire had indeed forgotten that. The great truth had swallowed up the little lie, but true and false were now as plain to her as day and night. Moreover, she saw the meaning of the false.