“Gulian!” At the moment it was all she found, but then fancy a blind man dazzled.
Verplank nodded. “Yes. The letters you received at Coronado—there were three of them, were there not? three written on gray paper each signed Effingham Verplank?—well, my father wrote them, that’s true enough, but he wrote them to your aunt, your mother’s sister, Hilda Hemingway. Did you never hear that the governor had an affair with her? Did you?”
Leilah’s face spoke for her. From the bewilderment there, it was obvious that of it all she was ignorant.
With an uplift of the chin Verplank considered her.
“That’s odd, girls generally only hear what they ought not to. However, Hemingway became suspicious—for very good reasons, no doubt, or, if you prefer, for very bad ones—the result being that his wife turned the letters over for safe keeping to your mother. When she died your father found them. He did not stop there, he showed them to my mother. My mother knew the facts, but she said your father was so convinced of your mother’s infidelity that it seemed a pity to disabuse him. Those were her very words to me to-day.”
“Gulian!” Still Leilah found but that. Visibly the light was there. As yet she could not credit it.
Again, but now appreciatively, Verplank nodded. “Yes. I know. It does seem queer. But then my mother is not the ordinary woman. She thought the governor so created to conquer that it no more occurred to her to sit in judgment on his victims than it occurred to her to sit on him. In the true spirit of Christian charity she overlooked it all.”
Verplank paused, opened and closed a hand. “It was not matrimony perhaps, but it was magnificent,” he obliging resumed, forgetting wholly that it was not in him to do likewise.
“Come,” he added. From the start, Leilah’s apparel, the fichu and wrap, had made him fancy that she was as ready to go as he was to take her and it all seemed very simple. “Come. Let’s be off. I have a cab for you.”
But at the suggestion which was a command she undid the lace, loosened the cloak.