Lockwood must have recognized it. He had made a mistake. It was no sufficient answer to anything that he had done to assert that some one else had also done something.
"Inez," he said, and we could almost hear his feet as he moved over the floor in her direction in a last desperate appeal, "can't you trust me, when I tell you that everything is all right, that they are trying to ruin me—with you?"
There was a silence, during which we could almost hear her quick breath come and go.
"Women—not even Peruvian women are like the women of the past, Chester," she said at length. "We are not playthings. Perhaps we have hearts—but we also have heads. We are not to be taken up and put down as you please. We may love—but we also think. Chester, I have been to see Professor Kennedy, and—"
She stopped. It hurt too much to repeat what she had seen.
"Inez," he implored.
There was evidently a great struggle of love and suspicion going on in her, her love of him, her memory of her father, the recollection of what she had heard and seen. No one could have been as we were without wishing to help her. Yet no one could help her. She must work out her own life herself.
"Yes," she said finally, the struggle ended. "What is it?"
"Do you want me to tell you the truth?"
"Yes," she murmured.