"But it wasn't true. You knew that he wouldn't keep what belonged to you," burst out Janet.
"I knew it wasn't true, but people love to deceive themselves, and I had to explain to Martha. She would never have come if she had known how things really stood; she was unwilling, even as it was. But I was so sure, I thought I knew Jasper so well, exactly how I could threaten him, just where I could hurt him most. Had I not learned, when I was a boy, how proud and sensitive and generous he could be? I was as successful as I had hoped to be, but I wanted more and more, and see where it has brought me in the end!"
It seemed a relief to him to confess the very whole of his wrong-doing, to leave hidden no single meanness or small-souled thought. It was as though, in the clean night air, in the face of two just and clear-seeing companions, he wished to cast aside all the wrong of the past before making a new beginning.
"I am going away," he said. "It isn't because I found that my plan didn't pay as I had hoped it would. It is because I was happier back there in the West, serving out a sentence at hard labor, learning to live by the work of my hands rather than by my dishonorable wits. I can look back over my life and see just where my honesty began to waver, just when I first compromised with my own conscience and persuaded myself that something was fair and honest when I knew it was not. We had all the same chance, Jasper and Tom and I; look at them and look at me. You may wonder why I say all this to you. Perhaps it is because you alone saw through me, dared to tell me that I had no confidence even in my own claims, called me a man of straw and a bogy. Well, after to-night I am going back, to be a real man again."
For the first time Oliver slackened the speed of the car and nearly stopped in the road.
"Do you want to go now?" he inquired shortly. "We can take you to the station if you do. They don't need us down there, as they do the others."
"No, not now. I must know what my criminal bungling has amounted to, first. When I have seen the flood go down, then it will be time to go. I want to see this thing through."
They had straightened out into the level road and were forced to drive more slowly, for the highway was no longer empty. A big tractor was lumbering ahead, farm wagons turned out for them to pass, and hastily dressed men were thronging alongside. Two of them jumped upon the running board, but, seeing who sat in the car, muttered some imprecation and dropped off again. Anthony Crawford stood up and opened the door.
"I'll walk," he announced briefly. "Load in all the men you can carry. You will need every one."
Janet climbed over to the place beside her brother, and the tonneau filled up with men, who crowded the seats, clung to the step and the fenders, and sat in a row across the back of the car. They came to the end of the road at last where, in that place that had been so empty and quiet half an hour ago, there was now gathered a surging crowd of men, of horses, tractors, automobiles, and wagons. Oliver could see, on a knoll above the others, Polly standing with two farmers' wives, the only women there.