He inclined his head.
"I did it," he repeated. "But for me he would be, at this moment, working out his sentence, the just sentence of the outraged law."
Stella was silent, regarding him with eyes distended with horror.
"And he—he knew it?" she murmured, brokenly.
"No," he said. "He did not know it; he does not know it even now."
Stella breathed a sigh, then shuddered as she remembered how the boy Frank had insulted and scorned this silent, inflexible man, who had saved him from a felon's fate.
"He did not know it!" she said. "Forgive him!"
He smiled a strange smile.
"The lad is nothing to me," he said. "I have nothing to forgive. One does not feel angered at the attack of a gnat; one brushes the insect off, or lets it remain as the case may be. This lad is nothing to me. So far as he is concerned I might have allowed him to take his punishment. I saved him, not for his sake, but for another's."
Stella leaned against the door. She was beginning to feel the meshes of the net that was drawing closer and closer around her.