Creede winced as though she had spat in his face. He was ghastly pale, and he slumped rather than stood. He looked desperately ill.
“I was trying to help,” he pleaded, his ghastly face working. “Honestly, I was, Thax. I suppose that gas attack at my lab has dulled whatever brains I had. It seemed to me I was backing you up, and then all at once I realized I had said things that might make him think—”
“They made him think, all right,” assented the grim old lady. “And you backed Thax up, too—backed him clear up against the wall. If I hadn’t had the rare good luck to be able to prove he was innocent—”
“Oh, it’s all right, Clive,” said Vail, pitying his friend’s utter demoralization. “You meant all right. I—”
“It’s all wrong,” denied Creede brokenly. “I’ve harmed the best friend I have in the world. The fact that I was trying to help doesn’t make any difference. If you don’t mind, I’ll follow the sweet Moselys’ example—pack up and go home.”
“Nonsense!” scoffed Vail. “No harm’s done. Stay on here. You meant all right—”
“Hell is paved with the skulls of people who ‘meant all right,’” interpolated Miss Gregg, severely. “The vilest insult one rational human can heap upon another is that damning phrase, ‘He meant all right!’ It’s a polite term for ‘mischief maker’ and for ‘hoodoo.’”
Clive turned his hollowly sick eyes on her in hopeless resignation. But the sight did not soften her peppery mood.
“Clive,” she rebuked, “I’ve known you always. I knew your father. I know your brother—though I don’t mention that when I can help it. All of you have had plenty of faults. But not one of you was ever a fool. You, least of all. The war must have done queer things to your head as well as to your lungs and heart. No normal man, with all the brains you took with you to France, could have come back with so few. It isn’t in human nature. There’s a catch in this, somewhere.”
Creede bowed his head in weary acceptance of her tirade. Then he looked with furtive appeal at Doris. But the girl was again sitting with tight-clenched hands, her eyes downcast, her soft lips twitching. From her averted face he looked to Vail.