Gerard shook his head, but hesitated what to reply.
At last he said: “I can’t deny that I believe your friends are not always well chosen. I have had proof of it before.”
“Don’t you think that, if you were wise, you would leave to her fate a woman who had so many questionable friends, and whom you could not depend upon from one moment to another?”
Gerard took up her challenge with sudden fire.
“Yes,” he said, “I do think I should be wiser if I could do as you suggest; but, unluckily for me, I can’t. For, good or ill, Rachel, I love you so much that I can’t believe the evidence of my own eyes when you are in question. So that I am behaving like an imbecile, and persisting in refusing to believe anything but good of you, even though I am forced to believe very much that is not good of your friends and acquaintances.”
As usual when he made a speech like this, owning his steady interest in her, Miss Davison’s face broke up into softness and gentleness, thus riveting his chains, even while she would give him no hope that she was innocent of the things of which he thus by implication accused her.
For a moment he thought she was on the point of bursting into tears. But she exercised strong self-control, and carefully abstaining from again meeting his eyes, knowing what sort of look she should meet if she did, she turned her head languidly in the direction of the interior of the house, and said—
“But you mustn’t expect me to do anything but take their part, you know. Whatever may be thought, or fancied, or suspected of them by other people, I always stand by my own side, even assisting them to the utmost of my power.”
“You mean,” whispered Gerard desperately, “that you will warn the Van Santens that there is a detective here?”
She turned upon him sharply.