She leaned a little forward in her chair. Even then she did not understand.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean that the things which he told me with his last breath were for my own ear and my own knowledge alone," I answered. "I cannot share that knowledge even with you."
It seemed to me that there was something unreal, almost hideous, about the silence which followed. Through the open window there drifted into the room the early morning sounds of an awakening world—the whistling of birds in the shrubberies and upon the lawn, the more distant whir of a reaping machine at work in the cornfields. But between us—silence. I could not move my eyes from her face. There was no anger there, only a slowly dawning horror. She seemed to be looking upon me as a man doomed. I lit a match, and, taking some papers from my pocket, I slowly destroyed them.
"There go the last records," I said, blowing the ashes away, "I have learnt them by heart."
"I never thought of this," she murmured. "I never thought that you might be—oh! you cannot understand," she broke off. "You cannot know what you are doing."
"I have an idea," I answered grimly. "He warned me."
"Yet you cannot understand," she persisted. "Do you know that, even in saying this much to me, you are signing your death-warrant—that from this moment your life will not be safe for a single moment?"
"I know that there is danger," I answered; "but I am not an easy person to kill. I have had narrow escapes before, and escaped without a scratch."
She rose to her feet.