With a sigh of utter content Latimer, by a supreme effort, raised his hands to Philip's shoulders.
"Arthur!" Danvers groaned, holding him close as he looked into the glazing eyes.
"Did I doubt you?" whispered the judge. "Forgive me—my dear—friend—Phil!"
When Senator Blair learned of Judge Latimer's death he thought himself its prime cause and suffered as only a man can who is not wholly heartless. How poorly he had rewarded the friendship which had relieved him in his need at Fort Macleod! All his passion for Mrs. Latimer had died in that fearful moment when he looked on the curiously passive husband in the doorway; remorse bit like acid into the depths of his heart. The meaning glances and the interrupted conversations that met him everywhere the morning after the judge's death drove him to solitude. He even avoided his sister, Danvers and the doctor; but most of all he shunned the Honorable Mr. Moore. He had had enough of temptation! He would not allow himself again to be approached!
His belief that in the sight of God he was a murderer made Blair collapse during the day. He was confined to his room; and it was then that he told the Fort Benton physician all that was haunting him, hour by hour. Blair did not attempt to palliate his sin, and although the doctor had known much and suspected more, he could hardly find it in his heart to forgive either Winifred's brother or the woman who had led him on. The only ray of mercy he felt was that matters were not so bad as he had feared between these old friends of his; but in his bitterness at Arthur's death, he would not give Blair the consolation of knowing that it was only a question of a short time, at best, when the judge's weak heart must have failed. Let him suffer! Arthur had! For the first time the lenient doctor did not want to relieve pain. Neither he nor Blair knew of what had taken place between Eva and her husband after Charlie had left their rooms.
The doctor's bitterness, however, was as nothing to the inward storm which shook Danvers when Eva, in the height of her hysterical remorse and fear of exposure, told him the sorry tale of her first flutterings around the arc-light of Mr. Burroughs' ambition; of her consent to aid Mr. Moore in his efforts to influence uncertain legislators to vote for Burroughs, and that gentleman's acceptance thereof; of the clandestine meetings in her apartments with the Honorable William, and of the more open but far less harmless friendship with Senator Blair, pursued until she was singed with the flame of her own kindling and nearly consumed by its fires. And lastly, her husband's reproaches; her miserable evasions and the hurt that she had deliberately given him. When she told her silent listener of that last half hour Danvers held himself forcibly in his fear of doing the woman bodily harm. That she should have done this cruel thing! Her indiscretions had been bad enough, but they had been prompted by an ambition second only to Mr. Burroughs'. But to turn the knife wantonly in Arthur's heart of gold!... How nearly his friend had gone from him, believing that he was false!... And now he was dead!... dead!
Philip's agony broke its restraint, and Mrs. Latimer never forgot his scathing denunciation.