In the long while that seemed to me to elapse before he made an answer I had time to soundlessly cry from my heart in exquisite bitterness and fear:
“Oh, God! spare me this... spare me this... let this pass.”
Maurice Stair looked strangely pale standing there in the moonlight. When he did speak his voice was low and stammering: but I heard his words as clearly as bells.
“I never told you before—it seemed unnecessarily brutal—but now I know that it was a mistake. I ought to have told you. I found something on the spot where the bones lay—something that made me absolutely certain that the man killed there was Tony Kinsella. I have never told any one of it. I—”
“How dared you keep it secret? Oh! how dared you? What was it? But I do not believe you—nothing will ever make me believe you.”
I thought to cry the words in a ringing voice, but I found that I was speaking in a whisper. The ground was slipping away from beneath my feet; Africa was dragging her gift from my heart; my eyes dimmed; I swayed a little, almost falling: but still I whispered:
“I do not believe—I do not believe—”
At last I saw that he was holding something out towards me, and speaking:
“I searched long and well for the other—but—either it was washed away, or the kaffirs took it.”
The thing that lay in the palm of his hand stared up at me like a dull blue eye. I took it with trembling, frozen fingers—a little turquoise ear-ring!