Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/334

 But there was one who saw who neither cheered nor rushed about. Henry Harrington, through the barred windows of his cell, gazed at that mounting wall of flame half a mile away and was enough dismayed by the sight—yet his heart was too sick to be made sicker. He was rather numb tonight about a good many things. Copies of the Star extras had, of course, penetrated to the jail. He knew what had happened—to Adam John—to Judge Allen—to John Boland—knew why that wall of flame was rising. He knew it was insanity. It distressed him—yet only mildly, impersonally, as it were. He was a sort of burned-out ruin himself tonight and dumbly drank in the spectacle of the conflagration, conscious all the while of that dull pain at his heart which it seemed must never leave; for the next day after his love had died, he had been surprised to find it alive again. This was because he had subconsciously accepted Lahleet's hypothesis, so sympathetically and mendaciously planted in his mind, purely to anesthetize his suffering—the theory that Billie believed him guilty. Eventually he confessed it aloud to himself: "She thinks I'm guilty . . . They've made her believe it. . . . She's just so shocked she can't think what to do. . . . That makes her doubt me all along the line." From this moment forward, Henry thought he had originated this idea, so that when later Lahleet advanced a totally different hypothesis he saw no reason to doubt her single-mindedness.

So tonight as the flames burned up John Boland's fortune, while Henry languished, seemingly forgotten, in a cell, he could mutter doggedly, lyrically: "I love her! I love her!" But abruptly the languishing one