She shuddered.
"I—I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know—Japheth had told me, in—in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you."
The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going. Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.
After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?—something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."
"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord of the Wanderlied had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.
"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?—to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know."
"Of course I care," she assented.
"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has happened."
"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."
"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the—on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what Japheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."