"I do not know. I only know that he is resolved upon making you trouble. It was he who incited this riot. He did it by circulating anonymous missives and by—forgive me for telling you this—affixing scrawls of the same ambiguous character on fences and on walls, and even on—on—" (Here terror tied her tongue, for his hand had closed about her arm in a forceful grip, and the fire in the eye holding hers was a consuming one) "the rails—of—of BRIDGES."
"Ah!"
The cry was involuntary, but not so the steady settling of the lips which followed it and the determined poise of his body as he waited for her next word.
"Miss Weeks, the little lady opposite, saw the latter and tore it off. But the mischief had already spread. Oh, strike me! Send me from your house!"
He gave no token of hearing her.
"Why is this man my enemy?" he asked. "I do not know any such person as you describe."
"Nor I," she answered more quietly.
"A bill-poster! Well, he has done his worst. I shall think no more about him." And the burning eye grew mild and the working lip calm again, with a determination too devoid of sarcasm to be false.
It was a change for which Deborah was in no wise prepared. She showed her amazement as ingenuously as a child, and he, observing it, remarked in a different tone from any he had used yet:
"You do not look well. You are still suffering from the distress and confusion into which this wretched swoon has thrown you. Or can it be that you are not yet convinced of our wisdom in ignoring this diabolic attack upon one whose reputation is as dear to us as our own? If that is so, and I see that it is, let me remind you of a fact which cannot be new to you if it is to others of happier memories, that no accusation of this kind, however plausible—and this is not plausible—can hold its own for a day without evidence to back it. And there is no evidence against my son in this ancient matter of my friend Etheridge's violent death, save the one coincidence known to many, that he chanced to be somewhere in the ravine at that accursed hour. A petty point upon which to hang this late and elaborate insult of suspicion!" And his voice rang out in a laugh, but not as it would have rung, or as Deborah thought it would have rung, had his mind been as free as his words.