He watched Dr. Weathered’s relict very closely while he was speaking. She seemed to be wrenched by conflicting fears. At one moment her lips parted as if to speak, at the next they closed again more tightly than before.
“Tell him, mother!” pleaded the girl.
The mother turned to her despairingly.
“I can’t! I daren’t! Don’t ask me to,” she cried hopelessly.
The representative of the law looked at his watch.
“If that is your last answer you must be prepared to take the consequences, Mrs. Weathered.” He pointed dramatically to a window of the room. “Look out of that window, Miss Neobard, and tell your mother what you see.”
Sarah rushed to the window and gave a sharp cry. “Mother, there is a gendarme watching the hotel!” She looked reproachfully at the physician. “And you told me you came here as a friend!”
“I am trying to act as one. Your mother has only to tell me the truth and I will open the window and send that man away.”
“Do you hear, mother? You won’t let me be arrested?”
Mrs. Weathered—Tarleton had meant to remind her that she was passing under a name not legally hers—had merely shivered again when she heard who was outside. Now she sprang out of her chair, a different woman.