"I did trust you—I did shield you. I gave you the paper. I kept still as the grave about what I saw that night."
"Still as the grave—there is no stillness like that," said the man, in a voice so hoarse and strange that Judith instinctively attempted to draw sideway from her perilous position.
But Storms changed as she did, still with his face to hers, pressing her toward the edge.
"If I kept back another paper, it was because I meant to give it you on our wedding day, and prove how much a poor girl could do toward saving the man she loved from—"
"From what?" questioned Storms, throwing his arm around the girl and drawing her back from the precipice, as if he had for the first time seen her danger. "Of what are you speaking, Judith?"
"Of a paper I found in the dress that was taken off William Jessup after he died, which makes the one I gave you of no worth at all."
"You have such a paper, and kept it back?" The man absolutely threw a tone of tender reproach into a voice that had been cold as ice and bitter as gall a minute before. "Let me read it; the moonlight is strong enough."
"It is not with me. I have put it by in safe hiding, meaning to burn it before your face and pay you for the marriage lines with your life."
Storms drew the girl farther away from the precipice, for he feared to trust the instinct of destruction that had brought him there, and would not all at once be subdued. He felt that his own life was, for the time, bound up in hers, and absolutely shuddered as he thought of the fate from which a word had saved him and her.
For a time they walked back to the orchard in silent disturbance: she unconscious of the awful danger she had run; he pondering new schemes in his mind.