She turned to Keredec with a frightened gesture and an unintelligible word of appeal, as if entreating him to deny what George had said. The professor’s beard was trembling; he looked haggard; an almost pitiable apprehension hung upon his eyelids; but he came forward manfully.
“Madame,” he said, “you could never in your life do anything that would make harm. You were right to speak, and I had short sight to fear, since it was the truth.”
“But why did you fear it?”
“It was because—” he began, and hesitated.
“I must know the reason,” she urged. “I must know just what I’ve done.”
“It was because,” he repeated, running a nervous hand through his beard, “because the knowledge would put us so utterly in this people’s power. Already they demand more than we could give them; now they can—”
“They can do what?” she asked tremulously.
His eyes rested gently on her blanched and stricken face. “Nothing, my dear lady,” he answered, swallowing painfully. “Nothing that will last. I am an old man. I have seen and I have—I have thought. And I tell you that only the real survives; evil actions are some phantoms that disappear. They must not trouble us.”
“That is a high plane,” George intervened, and he spoke without sarcasm. “To put it roughly, these people have been asking more than the Harman estate is worth; that was on the strength of the woman’s claim as a wife; but now they know she is not one, her position is immensely strengthened, for she has only to go before the nearest Commissaire de Police—”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Harman cried passionately. “I haven’t done THAT! You mustn’t tell me I have. You MUSTN’T!”