She looked at me in silence, her eyes shining out of the dusk. Then she lowered her head.
"I guessed it," she said in a whisper. "I guessed it then, for I know Mary's care for me. And the next morning when we sent her to warn you that the sheriff was at the door, I read it in her face. I mean," said she, recovering herself hastily, "I read your departure in her face, and I knew it was what she had said to you had driven you out, and not your own necessities."
She paused; I did not answer.
"The knowledge has troubled me sorely," she said, "for you were our guest."
"It made but the one night's difference," I urged, "for on the morrow came the officers."
"Ah! but that was the accident," she answered shrewdly. "They might not have come—they might never have come—and still you would have fled. I have said this much to you," she went on with a change of tone, "because I would have you look on me just as a friend, who trusts you, who has great cause to trust and thank you, and who would count it a very real happiness if she could, in any small way, repay you. I told you when we met on your march that I knew there was some great trouble."
"And the answer I gave to you then, I must give now. I am bound to face that trouble by myself. It was my sin brought it about."
"Ah! but one never knows whence help may come," she replied; and the gentle earnestness with which she spoke so tempted me to unbosom myself, that instinctively I drew away from her. "You think it is just a woman's curiosity which prompts me," she cried, mistaking my movement. "Ah! no. Acquit me of that fault! I am not sure, but it may be that I can help you."
Did she know? I wondered. My thoughts went back to that last meeting near Penrith. I had spoken then of a prison-door which must close between us twain, and she had made an answer which seemed to hint a suspicion of the truth.
"And even if I cannot, the mere telling sometimes helps," she continued, "so long as one tells it to a friend. I mean"—and here she began to speak very slowly, choosing her words, and with a certain difficulty in the utterance—"I mean I was afraid that something Mary might have said checks you. There are things one does not confide to an acquaintance, or, again, to one whom you think to look upon you as ever so much nearer than an acquaintance. But to a friend, yes! A friend is a halfway house between, where one can take one's ease;" and she drew a breath, like one that has come to the end of a dangerous task.