Page:The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.djvu/86

82 Calton leaned forward, and took her hand.

"Do you want to save his life?" he asked.

"Save his life?" she reiterated, starting up out of her chair with a cry; "God knows, I would die to save him."

"Pish," murmured Calton to himself, as he looked at her glowing face and outstretched hands, "these women are always in extremes. The fact is," he said aloud, "Fitzgerald is able to prove an alibi, but he refuses.

"But why?"

Calton shrugged his shoulders.

"That is best known to himself—some Quixotic idea of honor, I fancy. Now, he refuses to tell me where he was on that night; perhaps he won't refuse to tell you—so you must come up and see him with me, and perhaps he will recover his senses, and confess."

"But my father," she faltered.

"Did you not say he was out of town?" asked Calton.

"Yes," hesitated Madge. "But he told me not to go."

"In that case," said Calton, rising and taking up his hat and gloves, "I won't ask you."

She laid her hand on his arm.

"Stop! will it do any good?"

Calton hesitated a moment, for he thought that if the reason of Brian's silence was, as he surmised, an intrigue with a married woman, he would certainly not tell the girl he was engaged to about it—but, on the other hand, there might be some other reason, and Calton trusted to Madge to find it out. With these thoughts in his mind he turned round.

"Yes," he answered, boldly, "it may save his life."

"Then I will go," she answered, recklessly. "He is more to me than my father, and if I can save him, I will. Wait," and she ran out of the room.

"An uncommonly plucky girl," murmured the lawyer, as he looked out of the window. "If Fitzgerald is not a fool he will certainly tell her all—that is, of course, if he is able to—queer things these women are—I quite agree with Balzac's saying that no wonder man couldn't understand woman, seeing that God who created her failed to do so."

Madge came back dressed to go out, with a heavy veil over her face.