“You!” exclaimed Katharine, in a sudden astonishment which made her forget everything else for an instant. “Why? I know you liked him—”
“Liked him!” repeated Paul Griggs, in a voice that was almost loud, and the dull eyes flashed for a moment, and then became glassy again. “I can’t talk now,” he said, rapidly. “Forgive me—I can’t stop!”
Without waiting for her to go down, he sprang up the stairs. Katharine looked after him with wonder. A moment later she heard the door of the studio open and shut quickly, and she was sure that she heard one word, a name—Walter—spoken in the broken accent of a man’s despair.
Again she paused before she went downstairs, and hesitated, not as to what she should do, but as to what she should think. At least, she felt that her friend Griggs was not without heart, whatever the true ground of his extraordinary emotion might be. She had stumbled upon one of those mysteries which lie so near the dull surface of society around us, and had seen a human soul at that moment of all others when it would not have been seen. As she thought of it, she felt at the same moment the instinct to tell no one, not even Ralston, of the few words she had exchanged with Griggs on the stairs. The resolution formed itself in her mind unintentionally, as a natural prompting of honour against the betrayal of a secret accidentally learned. What the secret could be she could not guess, and it was long before she knew, but she did not break the promise which had formulated and pledged itself. Long afterwards, when she learned the strange story of Griggs’ life, which no one had ever suspected, she wondered that on that day he had not killed her with his hands rather than be delayed the smallest fraction of an instant on his way up those stairs. In his place, woman as she was, she would have been less merciful, and she would not have been courteous at all.
But she knew nothing of the wanderer’s existence, save that he had of late strayed into her own, and that he had seemed oddly attached to a man who was almost universally disliked without any well-defined reason. Her intuition told her that he had something to conceal, and her faith in him, such as it was, led her to believe that it was something not wrong, but sacred almost beyond anything imaginable.
She went quietly downstairs, and many things happened to her, good and bad, before she saw the face of Paul Griggs again. She found her mother and Mrs. Bright sitting side by side, and aunt Maggie was holding Mrs. Lauderdale’s hand, and admiring her bonnet. A death which does not come too near to them draws certain types of women together. As Katharine entered the room and saw the two together, she wondered whether the death of Walter Crowdie was to have the effect of reconciling the Lauderdales and the Brights.
“Well, child, have you seen her?” asked Katharine’s mother, with a considerable show of interest.
CHAPTER XXXV.
“People don’t often really go mad from grief,” said Mrs. Lauderdale, as she and Katharine walked slowly homeward in the bright spring afternoon. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Hester married again in a few years. Not very soon, of course—but in time. She’s very young yet. She’ll be very young still in five years—for a widow.”
“I don’t think she can ever get over it,” answered Katharine, rather coldly, being displeased at her mother’s careless way of speaking.