"Don't you fret. I'll bury him, if it troubles you so. But you needn't go along. You couldn't; it's too far, and you're too weak,"—seeing how she trembled.
"I am not weak—only nervous. I prefer to go along. But we must be secret, I suppose? Oh!"—with a start that was indeed "nervous."
"Yes, we must be secret," said Sam; and he looked as if he did not half like the business, but would not refuse.
"You are a good man, Mr. Rice, and I thank you." And with that, Mrs. Dolly Page caught up one of his hands, and kissing it hastily, began to cry, as she walked quickly away.
"Don't cry, and don't go until I have promised to do whatever you ask, if it will make you well again," Sam said, following her to the door.
"Then call for me to take a walk with you to-night. The moon is full, but no one will observe us. They would not think of our going there,"—with another shudder—and she slipped away from his detaining hand.
That evening Mr. Samuel Rice and Mrs. Page took a walk by moonlight. Laughing gossips commented on it after their fashion; and disagreeable gossips remarked that they came home very late, after their fashion. But nobody, they believed, saw where they went, or what they did. Yet those two came from performing an act of Christian charity, each with a sense of guilt and unworthiness very irritating to endure, albeit from very different causes. One, because an unwelcome suspicion had thrust itself into his mind; and the other——
The ground of Sam's suspicion was a photograph, which, in handling the gambler's body somewhat awkwardly, by reason of its weight—Mrs. Page had found, at the last, she could not render any assistance—had slipped from some receptacle in its clothing. A hasty glance, under the full light of the moon, had shown him the features of the lady who sat twelve paces away, with her hands over her face. It is not always those that sin who suffer most from the consciousness of sin; and Sam, perhaps, with that hint of possible—nay, almost certain—wickedness in his breast-pocket, was more burdened by the weight of it than many a criminal about to suffer all the terrors of the law; for the woman that he loved stood accused, if not convicted, before his conscience and her own, and he could not condemn, because his heart refused to judge her.
When the two stood together under the light of the lamp in the deserted parlor of the Silver Brick Hotel, the long silence which, by her quick perceptions, had been recognized as accusing her, upon what evidence she did not yet know, was at length broken by Sam's voice, husky with agitation.
"Mrs. Page," he said, assuming an unconscious dignity of mien and sternness of countenance, "I shall ask you some questions, sometime, which you may not think quite polite. And you must answer me: you understand. I'm bound to know the truth about this man."