Of course this supposition did not account for everything. There were discrepancies in any story which he could make up to account for the strange behavior, the glaring inconsistencies of the beautiful girl who had roused his admiration and inspired him with an unconquerable passion.
She seemed far too sane and well-balanced a girl to be subject to mania of any kind, and it seemed to him extraordinary, if she were really a prey to a disease so acute and so distressing, that she had not been put under some sort of restraint, or at least that she was not constantly shadowed by some companion who could explain her idiosyncrasy and pay for the things she stole.
He had heard of such things being done in well-known cases of this kind, and he felt sure that she could not have become so expert as she evidently was without the fact of her tendencies becoming known to some, at least, of her friends.
But even while he argued thus with himself, hoping against hope that he could prove to himself that she was innocent of criminal intent, one circumstance after another obtruded itself upon his mind, all tending to confirm the fact that she was too artful, too deliberate in her plans, for an innocent victim of instinct.
The sending of her mother to Brighton, for instance, and the cleverness with which she played off Mrs. Davison and Lady Jennings, the one against the other, pretending to the one that she was staying with the other, when all the while she was absent on some mysterious and unexplained “business,” spoke, not of innocence, but of a very well developed and keen instinct for deceit of the most flagrant kind.
And, if her thefts were the result of kleptomania, where did her income come from? For her appropriation of other people’s property to be blameless it must be proved that she did not profit by it. Whereas he knew that, without any occupation that could be traced to her, she made large sums of money!
And she had told him frankly that her character was not a lovable one, that there was a barrier between them which could never be passed.
Strange to say, however, it was upon these words of hers and the manner and tone in which she said them, that Gerard relied more than anything else for his own fixed and firm belief in her real innocence.
She was conscious that there was something in her character and conduct that would be disapproved of, and that would make an insurmountable obstacle between her and him. And yet she said this with an evident belief that she herself was justified in the course she held. And she was so grave, so sincere, so entirely sane in manner and look during their talk, that Gerard had felt convinced that the barrier of which she spoke was not one of the terrible character her actions would have led him to suppose.
And now—what was he to think?