The slate-blue eyes were transfixing him.
"And that was all—absolutely all, Tom?"
"I don't lie—to you," he said briefly.
She gave him her hand with an impulsive return to the old comradeship. "I believe you, Tom, in the face of all the—the unlikelinesses. But please don't try me again. After what has happened—" she stopped in deference to something in his eyes, half anger, half bewilderment, or a most skilful simulation of both.
"Go on," he said; "tell me what has happened. I seem to have missed something."
"No," she said, with sudden gravity. "I don't want to be your accuser or your confessor; and if you should try to prevaricate, I should hate you!"
"There is nothing for me to confess to you, Ardea," he said soberly, still holding the hand she had given him. "You have known the worst of me, always and all along, I think."
"Yes, I have known," she replied, freeing the imprisoned hand and turning from him. "And I have been sorry, sorry; not less for you than for poor Nancy Bryerson. You know now what I thought—what I had to think—when I saw you with her this evening."
It was slowly beating its way into his brain. Little things, atoms of suggestion, were separating themselves from the mass of things disregarded to cluster thickly on this nucleus of revealment: the old story of his companying with Nan on the mountain; his uncle's and Japheth's accusation at the time; and now the old moonshiner's enmity, Japheth's meaning look and distrustful silence, Nan's appearance with a child bearing his own name, the glances askance in Hargis's store when he was buying the little stock of necessaries for the poor outcast. It was all plain enough. For reasons best known to herself, Nan had not revealed the name of her betrayer, and all Gordonia, and all Paradise, believed him to be the man. Even Ardea ...
She had moved aside out of the square of window light, and he followed her.