“I think so, at one time,” she admitted frankly. “But I scarcely thought it would come to that. There are so many well-meaning people who always get up petitions.... No, as I stand here looking at myself over there, I feel that I couldn’t quite have hanged Frank, no matter how much he deserved it.... You are very shocked, Mr Carrados?”
“Well,” admitted Carrados, with pleasant impartiality, “I have seen the young man, but the penalty, even with a reprieve, still seems to me a little severe.”
“Yet how do you know, even now, that he is, as you say, an innocent man?”
“I don’t,” was the prompt admission. “I only know, in this astonishing case, that so far as my investigation goes, he did not murder your father by the act of his hand.”
“Not according to your Law Courts?” she suggested. “But in the great Palace of Justice?... Well, you shall judge.”
She left his side, crossed the room, and stood by the square, ugly window, looking out, but as blind as Carrados to the details of the somnolent landscape.
“I met Frank for the first time after I was at all grown-up about three years ago, when I returned from boarding-school. I had not seen him since I was a child, and I thought him very tall and manly. It seemed a frightfully romantic thing in the circumstances to meet him secretly—of course my thoughts flew to Romeo and Juliet. We put impassioned letters for one another in a hollow tree that stood on the boundary hedge. But presently I found out—gradually and incredulously at first and then one night with a sudden terrible certainty—that my ideas of romance were not his.... I had what is called, I believe, a narrow escape. I was glad when he went abroad, for it was only my self-conceit that had suffered. I was never in love with him: only in love with the idea of being in love with him.
“A few months ago Frank came back to High Barn. I tried never to meet him anywhere, but one day he overtook me in the lanes. He said that he had thought a lot about me while he was away, and would I marry him. I told him that it was impossible in any case, and, besides, I was engaged. He coolly replied that he knew. I was dumbfounded and asked him what he meant.
“Then he took out a packet of my letters that he had kept somewhere all the time. He insisted on reading parts of them up and telling me what this and that meant and what everyone would say it proved. I was horrified at the construction that seemed capable of being put on my foolish but innocent gush. I called him a coward and a blackguard and a mean cur and a sneaking cad and everything I could think of in one long breath, until I found myself faint and sick with excitement and the nameless growing terror of it.
“He only laughed and told me to think it over, and then walked on, throwing the letters up into the air and catching them.