“We’d better be going back to the house, Oliver,” she began.
“See here, Jane, I’ve been thinking. It’s wrong for me to ask you to marry me till all this mess is over. It’s wrong for me to even ask you to consider yourself engaged to me. We must wait. I mean it, dear. I’m under a cloud. There’s no getting around that fact. The—”
“Nobody believes you had anything to do with—”
“My dear girl, nobody knows what to believe,” said he seriously. “That’s the worst of it. My father is gone. I was, so far as any one knows, the last to see him. As you say, no one may believe that I had anything to do with it, but—where is he? That’s the question they are all asking—and no one answers. He is somewhere, living or dead. That’s sure. He may be out there in that swamp. And, Jane, here’s the horrible part of it. If he is out there, no one will believe he committed suicide. No one will believe that he made way with himself deliberately. He may have wandered into the swamp while out of his head—but he was not contemplating suicide. If that had been his intention, why did he draw all that money out of the bank? A queer thing has just happened. You know Peter Hines—that queer old bird who has always lived in the cabin at the lower end of the swamp? You can see it from the road in the daytime. He has skipped out. Boarded up the door and windows and—”
He started violently, the words dying on his lips. Off to the south, beyond the almost impenetrable wall of night, gleamed far-off lights in the windows of Peter Hines’s shack.
“He must have returned,” he said, in an odd voice. “Those lights—”
“Let us go in, dear,” she pleaded. “I—I hear something moving among the weeds down there. It’s grisly, Oliver—creepy.”
They were at the foot of the porch steps when he kissed her tenderly. “We must wait a little while, Janie, before telling them about—us. Till all this is cleared up and I am—”
She faced him, her hands on his shoulders.
“I shall tell them to-night,” she said resolutely. “To-morrow I shall tell everybody I know. What do you think I am? A fraidy-cat?”