She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. "You know about the rest—so much more than any other man," she added; and glanced up at him with a quaint expression.
Trent wondered at that look. But the wonder was only a passing shadow on his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before Mrs. Manderson ended her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that seemed so good to him.
He said: "I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was. Yes, I suspected—you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such a fool. Almost; not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself."
She interrupted him quickly. "What nonsense. Do be sensible, Mr. Trent. You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me with your solution of the mystery." Again the quaint expression came and was gone. "If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over me in large letters—so large that you couldn't believe very strong evidence against me after seeing me twice." Mrs. Manderson laughed, and her laugh carried him away with it. He knew well by this time that sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the perfect expression of enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight in the sound of it. "And now it's all over, and you know—and we'll never speak of it any more."
"I hope not," Trent said in sincere relief. "If you're resolved to be so kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on your blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs. Manderson, I had better go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake." He rose to his feet.
"You are right," she said. "But no! Wait. There is another thing—part of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we are about it. Please sit down." She took the envelop containing Trent's manuscript despatch from the table where he had laid it. "I want to speak about this."
His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. "So do I, if you do," he said slowly. "I want very much to know one thing."
"Tell me."
"Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a man's neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand that feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of was that you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel there is defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold."
Mrs. Manderson tapped her lips with the envelop without quite concealing a smile. "You didn't think of another possibility, I suppose, Mr. Trent," she said.