“Perhaps, but he had no intention of hurting me—he didn’t think that it would.”
“Oh, I know he had no murderous purpose. He just gave up to a selfish, brutal impulse, and afterwards he was too cowardly and too selfish to confess the truth.”
She turned upon him a steady, wondering gaze and he shrank back a little and went on more humbly:
“I suppose I ought not to speak in that way to you about your brother, and I hope you will pardon me. But when I compare your life with his it makes me too indignant to keep a bridle on my tongue. And, besides, Penelope,” and he leaned toward her with his manner again forceful with the strength of his convictions, “you know as well as I do how truthful is every word I have said.”
“And even if I do,” she rejoined with dignity, “it is possible that I would not choose to admit all that my secret heart might think.”
She stopped with a little start and a drawing together of her brows, and then, with alarm dawning in her eyes, she leaned forward eagerly and put a pleading hand upon his arm:
“You won’t say anything about this to mother, will you?”
Gordon hesitated, but his eyes, flashing with the intensity of his feeling, softened as they fell upon her anxious face.
“It’s hardly fair,” he said doggedly, “it certainly isn’t just, for her to glorify Felix as she does when he is—what he is. In justice to you she ought to know this.”
“That’s of no consequence at all beside the pain it would give her to know the truth. You don’t know mother—nobody does but me—and you can’t appreciate in the least what Felix, or, rather, her ideal of Felix, means to her. Mother is, and always has been, a romantic sort of woman, as you might guess”—and she smiled faintly at him—“by the names she gave her children. Her own life has been hard and monotonous, with little pleasure, little beauty—and she has such a beauty-loving nature—little opportunity. And she is so shy, too, she has so little self-confidence. So, don’t you see, all the romance and imagination that have been starved in her have been born over again for her in Felix. Felix is handsome, magnetic—he attracts people and makes everybody his friends, as she would have liked to do—he is a genius, he creates beautiful things, he lives in lovely surroundings, he is winning fame and wealth—life for him is a Grand Adventure, more beautiful and wonderful than anything she ever dared to dream. She knows Felix is selfish, but she can always see so many reasons why it is impossible for him to do any particular generous thing. Oh, Mr. Gordon, it would grieve her so to know how that accident really happened and how he concealed the truth and—and——”