“They made me do that,” confessed the unhappy woman. “He wasn’t in Montreal. He never had been there!”
“You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 381 King Edward when the coast was clear.”
“That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant.”
He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.
“So you sold me out!” he finally said, studying her white face with his haggard hound’s eyes.
“I couldn’t help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn’t give me the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you—but you held me off. You put the other thing before my friendship!”
“What do you know about friendship?” cried the gray-faced man.
“We were friends once,” answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery in his cry.
He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled, just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.
“So you sold me out!” he said for a third time. He did not move, but under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires which even he himself could not understand.