Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/430

THE BETTER SORT "Why, if it is traced. What do you make, other wise, of the facts to-night?"

"Do you call them facts?" the young man asked.

"I mean the Astounding Disclosures."

"Well, do you only read your headlines? 'The most astounding disclosures are expected'—that's the valuable text. Is it," he went on, "what fetched you?"

His answer was so little of one that she made her own scant. "What fetched me is that I can't rest."

"No more can I," he returned. "But in what danger do you think me?"

"In any in which you think yourself. Why not, if I don't mean in danger of hanging?"

He looked at her so that she presently took him for serious at last—which was different from his having been either worried or perverse. "Of public discredit, you mean—for having so unmercifully baited him? Yes," he conceded with a straightness that now surprised her, "I've thought of that. But how can the baiting be proved?"

"If they take possession of his effects won't his effects be partly his papers, and won't they, among them, find letters from you, and won't your letters show it?"

"Well, show what?"

"Why, the frenzy to which you worked him—and thereby your connection."

"They won't show it to dunderheads."

"And are they all dunderheads?"

"Every mother's son of them—where anything so beautiful is concerned."

"Beautiful?" Maud murmured.

"Beautiful, my letters are—gems of the purest ray. I'm covered."

She let herself go—she looked at him long. "You're a wonder. But all the same," she added, "you don't like it." 418