Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/419

 "Of course you'd never told me anything about you and this little teacher-woman being so—so well acquainted."

Henry's eyes widened, his heart stabbed with a memory of guilty concealments of—of nothings, that had become significant because they were concealments—for no other reason.

"And after," she went on, still in that plaintive, non-accusing voice, "after they put you in jail, you—you didn't send me word or anything—offer me any explanation—say that you wanted to hear from me or—anything."

"Yes; my accursed pride!" groaned Henry, outraged to perceive how he had expected everything and offered nothing. Ruthless with himself now, determined this girl should prove herself entirely innocent of that coldness of heart of which he had accused her so bitterly, he reminded her calculatingly: "But for two hours now—ever since they arrested Scanlon, you have known there was nothing in any of it but just a damnable plot."

"Oh, before that," she explained quickly, eyebrows lifted high in the fulness of her candor, "ever since the court decision and the other great upsetting things, the mob and the fire and all, every instinct cried out that you had been right in everything. Oh, from that moment you have seemed a heroic, a tragic, a triumphant figure to me; but"—a look of deeper distress came into her face—"but then it was too late," she whispered hoarsely, pulling at her hands. "Because if—if—if I wouldn't go to you when the daughter of John Boland was somebody, I couldn't come to you when she was nobody."