Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/355

Rh "Of course not!"

"I knew it!" he moved menacingly. She watched him quite without fear; fear was for him, she felt, not her. Often she had wished that she might have known him when he was a young man; now, she was aware that, in a way, she was having that wish. Under the surface of the man whose strength and determination she had admired, all the time had been this terror—this guilt. If Uncle Benny had carried it for a score of years, Henry had had it within him too. This had been within him all the time!

"You came up here about Ben Corvet?" he challenged.

"Yes—no!"

"Which do you mean?"

"No."

"I know then. For him, then—eh. For him!"

"For Alan Conrad? Yes," she said.

"I knew it!" he repeated. "He's been the trouble between you and me all the time!"

She made no denial of that; she had begun to know during the last two days that it was so.

"So you came to find him?" Henry went on.

"Yes, Henry. Have you any news?"

"News?"

"News of the boats?"

"News!" he iterated. "News to-night! No one'll have more'n one news to-night!"

From his slow, heavy utterance, a timbre of terrible satisfaction betrayed itself; his eyes widened a little as he saw it strike Constance, then his lids narrowed again. He had not meant to say it that way; yet, for an instant, satisfaction to him had become inseparable