"I will swear to you by all that is sacred that I do not! Oh, Grace, the first moment I saw you my heart told me that it was impossible; and now, this afternoon, as I listened to you with that sick girl, I felt a wretch for ever having—Grace, I tell you, you made me feel, for the moment, a better man than I ever felt in my life before. A poor return I have made for that, truly!"
Grace looked up in his face gasping.
"Oh, say that! say that again. Oh, good Lord, merciful Lord, at last! Oh, if you knew what it was to have even one weight lifted off, among all my heavy burdens, and that weight the hardest to bear. God forgive me that it should have been so! Oh, I can breathe freely now again, that I know I am not suspected by you."
"By you?" Tom could not but see what, after all, no human being can conceal, that Grace cared for him. And the devil came and tempted him once more: but this time it was in vain. Tom's better angel had returned; Grace's tender guilelessness, which would with too many men only have marked her out as the easier prey, was to him as a sacred shield before her innocence. So noble, so enthusiastic, so pure! He could not play the villain with that woman.
But there was plainly a mystery. What were the burdens, heavier even than unjust suspicion, of which she had spoken? There was no harm in asking.
"But, Grace—Miss Harvey—You will not be angry with me if I ask?—Why speak so often, as if finding this money depended on you alone? You wish me to recover it, I know; and if you can counsel me, why not do so? Why not tell me whom you suspect?"
Her old wild terror returned in an instant. She stopped short—
"Suspect? I suspect? Oh, I have suspected too many already! Suspected till I began to hate my fellow-creatures—hate life itself, when I fancied that I saw 'thief' written on every forehead. Oh, do not ask me to suspect any more!"
Tom was silent.
"Oh," she cried, after a moment's pause. "Oh, that we were back in those old times I have read of, when they used to put people to the torture to make them confess!"