"And me, Imogene—have you no thought for me?"
"Sir," said she, "any thought from one disgraced as I am now, would be an insult to one of your character and position."
It was true. In the eyes of the world Tremont Orcutt and Imogene Dare henceforth stood as far apart as the poles. Realizing it only too well, he uttered a half-inarticulate exclamation, and trod restlessly to the other end of the room. When he came back, it was with more of the lawyer's aspect and less of the baffled lover's.
"Imogene," he said, "what could have induced you to resort to an expedient so dreadful? Had you lost confidence in me? Had I not told you I would save this man from his threatened fate?"
"You cannot do every thing," she replied. "There are limits even to a power like yours. I knew that Craik was lost if I gave to the court the testimony which Mr. Ferris expected from me."
"Ah, then," he cried, seizing with his usual quickness at the admission which had thus unconsciously, perhaps, slipped from her, "you acknowledge you uttered a perjury to save yourself from making declarations you believed to be hurtful to the prisoner?"
A faint smile crossed her lips, and her whole aspect suddenly changed.
"Yes," she said; "I have no motive for hiding it from you now. I perjured myself to escape destroying Craik Mansell. I was scarcely the mistress of my own actions. I had suffered so much I was ready to do any thing to save the man I had so relentlessly pushed to his doom. I forgot that God does not prosper a lie."
The jealous gleam which answered her from the lawyer's eyes was a revelation.
"You regret, then," he said, "that you tossed my happiness away with a breath of your perjured lips?"