"She does not seem to take much interest in the recovery of her jewels," he said.
"She has every confidence in you," said Miss Bennett flatteringly.
Miss Bennett herself had. Never, she thought, had she seen a man who inspired her with a more comfortable sense of leadership. She saw he was not pleased at Lydia's sudden departure.
He was not. He was furious at her. His feelings about her had flickered up and down like a flame. The vision of her going over her house alone, her hair down her back and a revolver in her hand, alone—except for Morson tagging on behind—moved him with a sense of her courage; and not only her courage but her lack of self-consciousness about it. She had spoken as if anyone would have done the same. Her hardness toward the criminal had repelled him, and when he went upstairs to interview Evans a new sensation waited for him.
The robbery had not released Evans from her regular duties. She had just finished packing Lydia's things for the visit to the Emmonses, and the bedroom where she had been detained had the disheveled look of a room which had just been packed and dressed in. The bed had not been made, though its pink silk cover had been smoothed over it to allow for the folding of dresses on it. Lydia's slippers—pink mules with an edging of fur—were kicked off beside it. Long trails of tissue paper were on the floor. O'Bannon saw it all with an eye trained to observe. He saw the book of verses on the table beside her bed, the picture of the good-looking young man on her dressing table. He smelled in the air the perfume of violets, a scent which his sense remembered as having lingered in her hair. All this he took in almost before he saw the pale, black-clad criminal standing vacantly in the midst of the disorder.
"Sit down," he said.
He spoke neither kindly nor commandingly, but as if to speak were the same thing as to accomplish. Evans sat down.
It was a curious picture of Lydia that emerged from the story she finally told him—a figure kind and generous and careless and cruel, and, it seemed to him above everything else, stupid, blind about life, the lives of those about her.
Evans had a lover, a young English footman who had served a term for stealing and just lately got out with an advanced case of tuberculosis. Evans, who had remained adamant to temptation when everything was going well with him, fell at the sight of his ill health. She had attempted, lonely and inefficient as she was, to do the trick by herself. It was Lydia's irritation over Evans' regret at the loss of the bracelet that had apparently decided the girl.
"If she was so glad to be relieved of the things I thought I'd help her a bit," she said bitterly.