“It is unnecessary for me to tell you I will help you,” he answered in his low, smooth voice: “And now let us get to work systematically and see what can be done. I will begin by asking you a few questions. What sort of a looking woman is your wife?”
Felix straightened himself in his chair, felt in his inside pocket, and took from it a colored photograph. “As you see, she is rather small, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a slight figure—the usual English type. She has very beautiful teeth—very white—teeth you would never forget once you saw them; and she has quite small ears and, although the picture does not show this, small hands and feet.”
“And how would she dress now? This evidently was taken some years ago. I mean, what was her habit of dress? Would it be such as an Englishwoman would wear?”
Felix pondered. “Well, when Lady Barbara left she had—”
An expression of surprise on the priest's face cut short the sentence. O'Day looked at him in a startled way; then he recalled his words.
“Pardon me, but it is only fair that you should know that Lady Barbara is the daughter of Lord Carnavon, and that since my father's death they call me Sir Felix. I have never used the title here and may never use it anywhere. I would have assumed some other name when I arrived here, except that I could not bring myself to give up my own and my father's—he never did anything to disgrace it. He was caught in a trap, that is all, and I signed away everything I could to help him out. He stood by me when I was in India, and when he had a shilling he gave me half. I would rather have died, much as my wife blamed me, than not to have done what I did.
“And I would do it all over again, although I did not realize how big the load was until settling-day came. Dalton was at the bottom of it all. He floated the company. There was a story going around the clubs that he had got me into squaring it all up, knowing that I would be done for, and he could get away with her easier, but I never believed it. He has come into his own, if this wretched, suffering woman that Mrs. Cleary picked up is my wife; and I will come into mine”—here his eyes flashed—“if he has dragged her down and—”
Father Cruse again laid his quieting fingers this time on Felix's wrist.
“He has not dragged her down, Mr. O'Day. Of that you may be sure. A woman of her class doesn't go to pieces in a year. When she reaches the end of her means she will either seek work or she will go to one of the institutions to wait until she can hear from her people at home. I have known—”
Felix shook his head with an impatient movement. “You don't know her,” he exclaimed excitedly, “nor do you know her family. Her father has shut his door against her, and would step across her body if he found it on the sidewalk rather than recognize her. Nor would she ask him for a penny, nor let him or me or any one else know of her misery.”