His wonder increased as he saw that her eyes were moist with tears.
She took him to the bluff, behind the boat-house, where in the snow were the traces of one who had slid and fallen from a perilous height.
"What do these marks mean?" she asked,
"It didn't hurt me any," he replied with rising color.
"Did you stop to think at the time whether it would or not? Have you thought what a chain of circumstantial evidence you left against you on that dreadful night? Now come with me into the boat-house, and let me tell you in the mean time that a lace curtain in my room is sadly torn, and one of my window-panes broken."
While he yet scarcely understood her, every fibre of his being was beginning to thrill with hope and gladness; but he said deprecatingly: "Please forgive my intrusion. In my haste that night I blundered into a place where I had no right to be. No doubt I was very rough and careless, but I was thinking of the pain of cold and fear which you were suffering. I would gladly have broken that to fragments."
"O, I am not complaining. The abundant proof that you were not deliberate delights me. But come into the boat-house, and I will convict both you and myself, and then we shall see who is the proper one to ask forgiveness. What is this upon these ropes, Mr. Harcourt? and how did it come here?"
"O, that is nothing; I only bruised my hand a little breaking in the door."
"Is it nothing that you tugged with bleeding hands at these ropes, that you might go alone in this wretched shell of a boat to our aid? Why, Mr. Harcourt, it would not have floated you a hundred yards, and Burtis told you so. Was it mere vaporing when you said, 'If I cannot save them, I can at least drown with them'?"
"No," he said impetuously, the blood growing dark in his face; "it was not vaporing. Can you believe me capable of hollow acting on the eve, as I feared, of the most awful tragedy that ever threatened?"