At any other time Frithiof would have guessed the truth through that tremulous, unguarded question, which had escaped her involuntarily. But he was too miserable to notice it then.
“Oh, no, Roy is still at Paris. They heard to-day that he could not be back in time for the concert. It is I who have brought this trouble on you. Though how it came about God only knows. Listen, and I’ll tell you exactly how everything happened.”
By this time they had reached one of the parks, and they sat down on a bench under the shade of a great elm-tree. Frithiof could not bear to look at Sigrid, could not endure to watch the effect of his words; he fixed his eyes on the smutty sheep that were feeding on the grass opposite him. Then very quietly and minutely he told exactly what had passed that afternoon.
“I am glad,” she exclaimed when he paused, “that Mr. Boniface was so kind. And yet, how can he think that of you?”
“You do not think it, then?” he asked, looking her full in the face.
“What! think that you took it in absence of mind? Think that it would be possible for you deliberately to take it out of the till and pin it in your own pocket! Why, of course not! In actual delirium, I suppose, a man might do anything, but you are as strong and well as any one else. Of course, you had nothing whatever to do with it, either consciously or unconsciously.”
“Yet the thing was somehow there, and the logical inference is, that I must have put it there,” he said, scanning her face with keen attention.
“I don’t care a fig for logical inference,” she cried, with a little vehement motion of her foot. “All I know is that you had nothing whatever to do with it. If I had to die for maintaining that, I would say it with my last breath.”
He caught her hand in his and held it fast.
“If you still believe in me, the worst is over,” he said. “With the rest of the world, of course, my character is gone, but there is no help for that.”