“Yes, I will keep her; you sent her.”
He looked at her gratefully.
“And those are all who know? It may be kept from the scandal-mongers, even now. You must go.” He rose quickly, and she stood looking at him. “They need not know that you have seen me—that you have come in contact with the contamination of a prison cell. You may have come to see Colonel Summerford!”
She shook her head.
“I care nothing for all this,” she said; “all the world may know.”
“No,” he said, “but I care. To know that your name was being lightly dealt with, would increase my unhappiness tenfold. Go now. I have not thanked you for coming. If I were to try and tell you, I could not. My heart is too full of the sense of your goodness and sweetness——” He stopped. “Let happen what may, the remembrance of your presence in this cell, your gentle, pitying voice will be with me—yes, even to the end. Oh, hush! Forgive me!” for she had uttered a little cry, and wavered as if he had struck her. “No, I cannot tell you; but some day, perhaps——” He stopped, his voice breaking. “Go now,” and he took her hand and gently drew her to the door.
“And you?” she said, faintly; “are you going to keep silent? Are you going to let them do what they will with you? You spoke of the—end! What is that? Do you mean to let them—kill you?”
Her voice died away into a sob, and she gazed up into his face with dry, anguished eyes.
“God knows!” he said, reverently. “We are all in His hands. If you knew all—and you will never know, thank God!—you would understand; yes, and you would say that if you had been in my place you would have done the same.”
“You say that?” she asked, with an inscrutable expression in her eyes—“that I should do as you are doing; that I should take another person’s crime upon my shoulders and suffer for him?”