“Never,” Frances said.
Her hands were clasped as she sat. There was no longer any agitation about her. She might have been a carven image, so still was she, so utterly aloof and removed from all emotion.
He glanced at her once or twice as he walked, and finally came and stood before her.
“I haven’t told you quite everything even now,” he said. “There’s one thing I’m almost afraid to tell you. Shall I go on—or shall I hold my peace?”
“Go on!” she answered in the same dead-level voice.
“You think nothing matters now,” he said. “You think you won’t care. You’re wrong. You will care—horribly.”
“I think I have got to know,” she said, “whatever it is.”
“All right,” he said recklessly. “You shall know. After some damnable fate had taken you to Tetherstones, after they had tried to murder me and failed, after that night at Fordestown when you refused to come with me, the devil entered into me, and I made up my mind I’d get you—at any cost. And so I played you a trick. I lied to you.” He bent down, trying to read her impassive face. “Do you understand? I tricked you—to get you up here.”
She did not flinch or give any sign of feeling. “Do you mean about my sketches?” she said.
“Yes. That’s just what I do mean. I have got them all here. No one has seen them but myself.”