Mr. Orcutt, who had watched her with a lover's fascination during all this attempted explanation, shivered for a moment at this last bitter cry of love and despair, but spoke up when he did speak, with a coldness that verged on severity.
"So you loved another man when you came back to my home and listened to the words of passion which came from my lips, and the hopes of future bliss and happiness that welled up from my heart?"
"Yes," she whispered, "and, as you will remember, I tried to suppress those hopes and turn a deaf ear to those words, though I had but little prospect of marrying a man whose fortunes depended upon the success of an invention he could persuade no one to believe in."
"Yet you brought yourself to listen to those hopes on the afternoon of the murder," he suggested, ironically.
"Can you blame me for that?" she cried, "remembering how you pleaded, and what a revulsion of feeling I was laboring under?"
A smile bitter as the fate which loomed before him, and scornful as the feelings that secretly agitated his breast, parted Mr. Orcutt's pale lips for an instant, and he seemed about to give utterance to some passionate rejoinder, but he subdued himself with a determined effort, and quietly waiting till his voice was under full control, remarked with lawyer-like brevity at last:
"You have not told me what evidence you have to give against young Mansell?"
Her answer came with equal brevity if not equal quietness.
"No; I have told Mr. Ferris; is not that enough?"
But he did not consider it so. "Ferris is a District Attorney," said he, "and has demanded your confidence for the purposes of justice, while I am your friend. The action you have taken is peculiar, and you may need advice. But how can I give it or how can you receive it unless there is a complete understanding between us?"