“Oh, but I—he——”
“Poor child.” Holt’s interruption expressed ever so much of his pity. “Child first, then woman. You acknowledge that I am right, don’t you? Then aren’t you willing to help him? Only you can help him now. John is not a man to talk, as you know, but he knows that I am his friend. ‘I have just strength enough to stay away,’ he told me. ‘I’m afraid that if I saw her, if she called me by so much as a look——’ You see, Miss Trent, the state to which the long strain has reduced him? You want him to win his fight, don’t you, for sake of his future and your own?”
“But you ask us to act like guilty persons,” she plead. “Judge Strang said ‘not guilty.’ To me that means that what—whatever we feel for each other is not guilt. If he is not guilty, then neither am I. Why should I lower myself to the standards of the world—why should I hide?”
“Because you are in the world and of it. I profess only a man’s friendship for John Cabot. But to protect him I played a rôle which is likely to ruin me professionally. He relies on me at present to look after you. In the event of his demanding to see you it would be better if even I did not know your whereabouts. I’d advise that you go to the shore somewhere. Let my secretary know when you decide just where—you can reach him by telephone—and your remittances will be sent regularly through him. Come, lovely lady, what do you say? Is all John Cabot’s strength to be discounted by his weakness for you?”
Dolores leaned over a bowl of purple pansies that kept eyeing her from a nearby tabourette; gazed into their ingenuous faces.
“But he wouldn’t leave me without a word, I know. What would he think—how would he feel if I——”
“Only in the event of his weakening need he know. Have I impressed you with the fact that once he begins to see you, he and I are done for? You are a woman of whom I would have expected that self-sacrificing passion with which a man’s friendship compares as a handshake to love’s first kiss. Are you unwilling to seem to lose your case with him for a little while?”
He arose, found his hat and stood for a moment looking down at her. But she looked only into the pansies’ hearts. A hopeful smile was on his face as he turned. He nodded confidently at the Airedale, just before closing the door, very quietly, after him.
The puppy, a man’s dog, sat sniffing and whining at the sill for some time after his congenial acquaintance had gone. But Dolores did not bewail the attorney’s exit. With a fury strange to her, she resented his call, his gentleness and the cruelty which it wrapped.
What manner of friendship was his, smilingly to urge the torture of his friend in order to save himself? Where was the worth of admiration that demanded of a peccable human passion the blamelessness of one divine? The pansies knew and she knew. But if John learned that she had hidden herself away from him, how could he be expected to know? Love was tender and easily hurt.