“God grant it,” said Mrs. Knapp.
She was silent for a few minutes, and I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.
I was moved by her signs of feeling. I thought they were for the boy and was about to ask what would happen to him in case he was found by the enemy, when she said:
“Now tell me about Henry Wilton—how he died and when.”
Again the vision of my first dreadful night in San Francisco rose before me, the cries for help from my murdered friend rang in my ears, and the scene in the alley and the figure in the morgue burned before my eyes.
I told the tale as it had happened, and as I told it I read in the face before me the varying emotions of alarm, horror and grief that were stirred by its incidents.
But one thing I could not tell her. The wolf-face I had seen in the lantern flash in the alley I could not name nor describe to the wife of Doddridge Knapp. Yet at the thought the dark mystery grew darker, yet, and I began to doubt what my eyes had seen, and my ears had heard.
Mrs. Knapp bowed her head in deep, gloomy thought.
“I feared it, yet he would not listen to my warnings,” she murmured. “He would work his own way.” Then she looked me suddenly straight in the face.
“And why did you take his place, his name? Why did you try to do his work when you had seen the dreadful end to which it had brought him?”