“You can,” he said, and it was as though he flung the whole of his enigmatic and vivid personality into those two words.
“You can,” he said again. “Absolutely.”
“I must think,” she muttered, pressing her hands to her head. “So much depends—how can I trust you? Why should I—why?”
“Because I'll trust you first,” he answered with a touch of exultation in his manner. “Listen to me and I'll tell you everything. And that means I put my life in your hands. Well, that's nothing; I would do that any time; but other people's lives will be in your power, too—yes, and everything I'm here for, everything. Now listen.”
“Not now,” she interrupted sharply. “He may be watching, listening—he generally is.” Again there was no need between them to specify to whom the pronoun referred. “Will you meet me tonight near the sweet-pea border—about nine?”
She glided away as she spoke without waiting for him to answer, and as soon as he was free from the magic of her presence, reaction came and he was torn by a thousand doubts and fears and worse.
“Why, I'm mad, mad,” he groaned. “I've no right to tell what I said I would, no right at all.”
And again there returned to him his vivid, dreadful memory of how she had started on that midnight drive with her car so awfully laden.
And again there returned to him his old appalling doubt:
“Did she not know?”