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334 manner and his face she knew that what Avery had just told her was the truth. She shrank away from them. Her hands went to her face and hid it.

So this was that unknown thing which had stood between herself and Hugh—that something which she had seen a hundred times check the speech upon his lips and chill his manner toward her! Hadn't Hugh himself told her—or almost told her it was something of that sort? He had said to her on the train, when she urged him to defend himself against the charge of having attacked her father, "If I told them who I am, that would make them only more certain their charge is true; it would condemn me without a hearing!" And his being Hugh Overton explained everything.

She knew now why it was that her father, on hearing Hugh's voice, had become curious about him, had tried to place the voice in his recollection—the voice of a prisoner on trial for his life, heard only for an instant but fixed upon his mind by the circumstances attending it, though those circumstances afterward had been forgotten. She knew why she, when she had gazed at the picture a few minutes before, had been disturbed and frightened at feeling it to be a kind of picture unfamiliar to her and threatening her with something unknown and terrible. She knew the reason now for a score of things Hugh had said to her, for the way he had looked many times when she had spoken to him. It explained all that! It seemed to her, in the moment, to explain everything—except one thing. It did not explain Hugh himself; the kind of man he was, the kind of man she knew him to be—the man she loved—he could not be a murderer!