“You arouse my curiosity anyway,” he declared. “Get on and let’s hear it.”
Hilliard answered quietly, but he felt excitement arising in him as he thought of the disclosure he was about to make.
“First of all,” he began, speaking more and more earnestly as he proceeded, “I have to make you an apology. I quite deliberately deceived you up at the clearing, or rather I withheld from you knowledge that I ought to have shared. I had a reason for it, but I don’t know if you’ll agree that it was sufficient.”
“Tell me.”
“You remember the night before last when I rowed up to the wharf after we had left the Coburns? You thought my suspicions were absurd or worse. Well, they weren’t. I made a discovery.”
Merriman sat up eagerly, and listened intently as the other recounted his adventure aboard the Girondin. Hilliard kept nothing back; even the reference to Madeleine he repeated as nearly word for word as possible, finally giving a bowdlerized version of his reasons for keeping his discoveries to himself while they remained in the neighborhood.
Merriman received the news with a dismay approaching positive horror. He had but one thought—Madeleine. How did the situation affect her? Was she in trouble? In danger? Was she so entangled that she could not get out? Never for a moment did it enter his head that she could be willingly involved.
“My goodness! Hilliard,” he cried hoarsely, “whatever does it all mean? Surely it can’t be criminal? They,”—he hesitated slightly, and Hilliard read in a different pronoun—“they never would join in such a thing.”
Hilliard took the bull by the horns.
“That Miss Coburn would take part in anything shady I don’t for a moment believe,” he declared, “but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be so sure of her father.”