“Why didn’t you answer my letter?” asked John, at last, but he could not disguise the bitterness of his voice.
“I only—it only came—that is—it was this evening, when I was all dressed to come here.”
John could not control his expression any longer, and his lip bent contemptuously, in spite of himself.
“It was mailed very early this morning, with a special delivery stamp,” he said, coldly.
“Yes, it reached the house—but—oh, Jack! How can I explain, with all these people?”
“It wouldn’t be easy without the people,” he answered. “Nobody hears what we’re saying.”
Katharine was silent for a moment, and looked at her plate. In a lover’s quarrel, the man has the advantage, if it takes place in the midst of acquaintances who may see what is happening. He is stronger and, as a rule, cooler, though rarely, at heart, so cold. A woman, to be persuasive, must be more or less demonstrative, and demonstrativeness is visible to others, even from a great distance. Katharine did not belittle the hardness of what she had to do in so far as she reckoned the odds at all. She loved John too well, and knew again that she loved him; and she understood fully how she had injured him, if not how much she had hurt him. She was suffering herself, too, and greatly—much more than she had suffered so long as her anger had lasted, for she knew, too late, that she should have believed in him when others did not, rather than when all were for him and with him, so that she was the very last to take his part. But it was hard, and she tried to think that she had some justification.
After Ralston had finished telling his story, Russell Vanbrugh, who was an eminent criminal lawyer, had commented to her upon the adventure, telling her how men had been hanged upon just such circumstantial evidence, when it had not chanced that such a man as Doctor Routh, at the head of his profession and above all possible suspicion, had intervened in time. She tried to argue that she might be pardoned for being misled, as she had been. But her conscience told her flatly that she was deceiving herself, that she had really known far less than most of the others about the events of the previous day, some of which were now altogether new to her, that she had judged John in the worst light from the first words she had heard about him at the Assembly ball, and had not even been at pains to examine the circumstances so far as she might have known them. And she remembered how, but a short time previous to the present moment, she had looked at the sealed envelope with disgust—almost with loathing, and had turned over its ashes with the tongs. Yet that letter had cost him a supreme effort of strength and will, made for her sake, when he was bruised and wounded and exhausted with fatigue.
“Jack,” she said at last, turning to him again, “I must talk to you. Please come to me right after dinner—when you come back with the men—will you?”
“Certainly,” answered John.