"Mrs. Bembridge, then, has been the means of my making a discovery which is of tremendous importance, and thus she has unconsciously saved me from an awful danger.
"By preventing George Dallas from finding out this fact for a little longer?"
"Precisely so. Now I hope you have come to yourself, Harriet, and will talk rationally about this."
"I will," she said, rising from her chair and approaching him. She placed her hands upon his shoulders, and looked at him with a steady, searching look. "We will talk this out, Stewart, and I will not shrink from anything there is to be said about it; but you must hear me then, in my turn. We are not like other people, Stewart, and our life is not like theirs. Only ruin can come of any discord or disunion between us."
Then she quietly turned away and sat down by the window, with her head a little averted from him, waiting for him to speak. Her voice had been low and thrilling as she said those few words, without a tone of anger in it, and yet the callous man to whom they were addressed heard in them something which sounded like the warning or the menace of doom.
"When Dallas knows what we now know, Harriet," said Routh, "he will come to us and tell us his discovery, and then the position of affairs will be that for which we were prepared, if we had not succeeded in inducing him to be silent about Deane's identity."
"Exactly so," said Harriet; "with the additional difficulty of his having concealed his knowledge."
"Yes," said Routh; "but that is his affair, not ours. He concealed his knowledge because he was compromised. There is nothing to compromise me. I neglected a public duty, certainly, in favour of a private friendship; but that is a venial offence."
It was wonderful to see how the callousness of the man asserted itself. As he arranged the circumstances, and stated them, he began to regain his accustomed ease of manner.
"It is unfortunate that he should be compromised in this double way, and, of course, there will be a great deal to go through, which will be hard to bear, and not easy to manage; but, after all, the thing is only as bad as it was when Dallas came back. Don't you see that, Harriet?"