“Well?” said Gilead, the moment that she was gone, appealing to his amanuensis.
Miss Halifax went on writing, but with a slight flush on her cheek.
“Does anything strike you?” he said, persisting.
“Only, perhaps,” she answered softly, “that for an ingénue, she showed considerable resourcefulness and self-possession.”
“H’m!” said Gilead. He reseated himself and, leaning back, tapped his fingers together, between doubt and a small sense of irritation: “We must remember her Continental training, perhaps. As to her father, and her father’s friends, I must confess to some sort of suspicion; but the quality of the graft, Miss Halifax, is not to be judged by the briar. I see no reason to question the main truth of her story; but anyhow it is easily put to the proof. The steamer was certainly sunk as she described. If she was a passenger by it, and the company, being questioned, admits her claim, that surely is all that is necessary to our taking action in the matter. Do you not agree with me?”
For the first time the young lady glanced across at him in an agitated way.
“I must,” she said low, “on the face of things. It is only the—the guilefulness of my own sex, its plausibility, and its imaginative readiness in concocting fables to—to delude the noble and the generous, that make me sceptical. I can’t help comparing this story with some others we have heard; but I daresay my experiences have robbed me of some delusions about women—indeed I am sure they have, and as much to my shame as to my good.”
He looked at her with a sudden light of remorse in his eyes.
“I never thought of that in my self-centred blindness,” he said—“that you might suffer from contact with vice.”
“Indeed, no,” she answered very earnestly. “I suffer, but it is the fires of purification. I am a better woman, I hope, than I was. Please do what you think right in this case, Mr Balm. Your judgments, as I said before, put us constantly to shame.”