Part 39 (2/2)

She raised her eyes, and the look in them seemed to give the lie to every word he had said.

”What do you call a friend? Did I not trust you--put myself in your power--fall confidingly in with your hateful plot--after I had been plainly warned not to? Oh, if I had only listened to Mr. Higginson, I should not have the humiliation of remembering that--hour on the yacht!”

The name stung him into instant recollection. He stood staring at her, and his face darkened.

In the first staggering revelation of her look, his sub-conscious mind had leapt instantly to the conclusion that his cunning enemy, having found out his secret, had betrayed it to Miss. Carstairs. Her first words had disposed of that. It was the tortured mother, not the professional sneak, who had been before him with his explanation. But now it rushed over him that he had an infinitely deeper grudge against the vanished spy. For it was Higginson, with his bribe-money, who had broken down the yacht; Higginson who would, in any case, have forced the return to Hunston; Higginson who had given this girl the right to think, as she did think, that she owed her escape wholly to an ”accident” to the machinery.

He had thought that he had saved Uncle Elbert's daughter from himself, and lo, his enemy had plucked the honor from him. The world should not be big enough for this man to elude his vengeance.

”You mention Mr. Higginson. Where is he?”

She glanced at him, impersonally, struck by the unconscious sternness of his voice.

”I do not know, but I am most anxious to see him--to thank him--”

”I am told that he left town at four o'clock. Perhaps you know his address in New York?”

”I do not,” she answered coldly. ”No doubt he went away hurriedly ...

frightened of you because of his kindness to me.”

She came a step forward to the gate. Instantly his thought veered back to her and his tense face softened.

”How can I blame you,” he said hurriedly, ”for thinking the worst of me?

I've been thinking badly enough of myself, G.o.d knows. But don't you know, can't you imagine, that nothing could have held me to the miserable business a single moment after I saw you, had I not been bound by a solemn promise to your poor father?”

”My father! Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to _promise_ to do it for him?”

”Because he is breaking his heart for you, and you didn't know it. It seemed right that he should see you, since he wants to so much.”

All her sense of the wrong he had done her flared up in anger at that.

”How do _you_--_dare_ say what seems right between my father and me? He is breaking his heart for me, he told you? Did he mention to you that she had _broken_ hers for him? Don't you suppose that I have had time--and reasons--to decide which of them I belong to?”

”All this,” he said, ”was before I knew you.”

About them hung the stillness of the country and the long empty road.

The woods stirred; a bird called; a portly hare poked his nose through the brush over the way, and suddenly scuttled off, his white flag up. In Mrs, Thurston's yard, the quiet was profound.

”All his life,” said Mary Carstairs, ”my father has thought about nothing but himself. I am sorry for him--but he must take the consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing, too. For you--there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him nothing. He must beg my mother's forgiveness before he shall ever get mine.”

She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him.

”You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye.”

”Not good-bye,” said Varney, instantly. ”You must not say that.”

”I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say.”

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