“Your sister!” Brant fought a good fight for self-control and won it. “No, Dorothy; it is not Isabel’s belief that troubles me; it is yours. How could you have misunderstood?”
Dorothy felt her lips growing cold, and the solid floor of the cell swayed under her feet until she clung to the wall for support.
“How could I? But she told me—” She broke off in pitiable confusion, and Brant gave her the helping hand of a question:
“What was it she told you? I have given you the right to say anything you please to me now.”
She saw instantly that she must go on or leave Isabel under an imputation too dreadful to be contemplated. “She told me that—that she sent you away.”
“Sent me away? But she didn’t send me away; that couldn’t be, you know. It is all a mistake, Dorothy—an awful mistake. It was not I whom she sent away; it was Harry.”
“Harry!” said Dorothy faintly. “Oh, dear, what have I done? Tell me one thing, please. Whom did you meet the last evening you came to see us?”
It was Brant’s turn to be confused and tongue-tied, and he answered her with his eyes on the floor.
“I met—your mother. I went over that evening to tell you that—I—loved you, my darling; to tell you what I had been, and what I hoped to be, and to ask you to wait until I could make my promises good. Your mother met me, and— But no matter about that. It was she who sent me away—for good reasons, you will say now. None the less, bad as I am, and good as you are, I love you—you and no other, my dear one; how truly and passionately you may know some day.”
“Some day!” She knew at that sublime moment, and the keen joy of the knowledge made her lose sight of everything save the heart-quelling fact. “Thank God, I know it now!—know that you are here in prison because you thought it was the only way to save my brother. Oh, how could I——”