It was hard to break into this calm hopefulness with words of stern or sinister meaning. But Mr. Gryce had no choice.
"What, then, is your special desire?" asked that officer.
Mr. Gillespie's eyes fell, and for a moment he stood thinking, then he said;
"I have retribution to make to her memory. I wish to take her to my own house and bury her from there as my wife. The humiliation from which my pride recoiled in the old days has been meted out to me ten-fold. I no longer wish to evade my responsibilities."
His expression as he said this was very different from the smile I had surprised on his face the night he stooped over his dead father. Yet the one brought up the other, and, in a measure, acted as a mutual interpretation. By means of it and the determination he had just expressed, I could comprehend the feeling of that moment, when with police in the house and the whole family subjected to a suspicion which involved it in the utmost disgrace, he contemplated the features of the man whose pride found the hemisphere in which he lived too small to hold both himself and the daughter whose worst fault was a proclivity to dance and sing.
Mr. Gryce, who had no such memories to reconcile, was meanwhile surveying the young man with a curious hesitation.
"I regret," said he, "the presence of an obstacle to your very natural wish to bury your wife from your own house. Mr. Gillespie, it is my duty to inform you that we are not here on a simple errand of surveillance: my orders were to arrest you on the charge of murdering your father."