"Some time, doubtless."
"Oh, dear! Then the suspense isn't over at all!"
"Well, it's over for the present, anyway. Eades can do nothing, so Marriott says, as long as Hunter is away, and even if he were to return, the fact that Hunter accepted the money and credited it on his books--in some fashion--would make it exceedingly difficult to prove anything, and of course, under any circumstances, Hunter wouldn't dare--now."
Elizabeth sat a moment idly playing with a fork, and her father studied the varying expressions of her face as the shades came and went in her sensitive countenance. Her brow clouded in some little perplexity, then cleared again, and at last she sighed.
"I feel a hundred years old," she said. "Hasn't it been horrible?"
"I feel like a criminal myself," said Ward.
"We are criminals--all of us," she said, dealing bluntly, cruelly with herself. "We ought all of us to be in the penitentiary, if anybody ought."
"Yes," he acquiesced.
"Only," she said, "nobody ought. I've learned that, anyway."
"What would you do with them?" he asked, in the comfort of entering the realm of the abstract.