“You wait till you hear all he’s done! I don’t mean taking my revolver from me; he was justified in that, if you like, after what I’d done with it. He may even have been justified in taking away my clothes, if he couldn’t trust me to keep my word and stay in this awful house. But that isn’t the worst. He encouraged me to write a letter home, to my own poor people who may think me dead——”
“Well?”
There was more sympathy in her voice, more anxiety; but his was breaking with his great grief and grievance.
“He took it out himself, to send it to the General Post Office to catch the country post. So he said; and I was so grateful to him! On Saturday morning he said they must have got it; he kept on saying so, and you don’t know how thankful I was every time! But yesterday afternoon I found scraps of my letter in the waste-paper basket in his room; he’d never posted it at all!”
Phillida looked shocked and distressed enough at this; her liquid eyes filled with sympathy as they gazed upon the wretched youth.
“I’m a fool to blub about it—but—but that was the Limit!” he croaked, and worked the poor word till it came distinctly.
“It was cruel,” she allowed. “It must seem so, at any rate; it does to me; but then I understand so little. I can’t think why he’s hiding you, or why you let yourself be hidden.”
“But you must know what I’ve done; you must guess?”
The revolver was still in his hand; he gave it a guilty glance, and she looked from it to him without recoiling.
“Of course I guessed on Saturday.” There was a studious absence of horror in her tone. “Yet I couldn’t believe it, unless it was an accident. And if it was an accident——”