Shattuck's face, with a startled astonishment upon it, had grown more deeply grave. Every intimation of anger had fallen from his manner. "Guthrie," he said, in a tone so coercive, so serious, that the other looked up, newly intent, "is there no way to convince you? I never heard her sing. I never was in the pygmy burying-ground but that one time with your brother. Now, think! Is there no one else who might loiter about that house; who might venture—I should never take such a liberty—to look through the crevices of a closed window?"
Perhaps it was Shattuck's influence over Guthrie; perhaps the anxiety of a lover to believe his despair unfounded, to hope against hope—at all events, his long reflective pause indicated a change of mental attitude.
"Mrs. Yates's husband," suggested Shattuck, plying his advantage; "has nothing been heard about him lately?"
"Lord, yes!" exclaimed Guthrie, his mind reverting to the sensation of the day. "I seen him myself yestiddy 'mongst a gang o' horse-thieves a-hidin' out in the woods. I hed ter run fur my life, ez they set on me, six ter one. An' the sher'ff overhauled thar den jes ter-day."
His voice faltered a trifle. He looked shamefaced and downcast. The sheriff's suspicion concerning Shattuck had recurred to him, and he could not meet the man's eyes with this thought in his mind.
"Now, don't you see, Fee," argued Shattuck, "how likely a thing it is that Steve Yates should hang around his own cabin, and peer through the window to take a look at his own wife and child, whom he probably will never see again, unless in some such way?"
Guthrie nodded, more than half convinced. Still, with his hidden consciousness of that insult to Shattuck which he carried in his recollection of the sheriff's menace, of the mission of espionage which he had refused, he could not look up.
In some subtle way he knew that when Shattuck next spoke it was not to him alone that he addressed the information, but that the fact might be made manifest.
"Now I am going to give you a reason why I do not stand between you and Letitia." At the name Guthrie lifted a listening face. "I am engaged to be married to a lady in my own city. So Letitia may sing like an oread and look like a flower, but she is nothing to me."
He said the words with a clear conscience, for if she had fixed her affection upon him—somehow the idea aroused a vague sweet thrill in that mortgaged heart of his—it had been unsought.