“That’s what they should do.”
In the dusk of the vine-clad, flower-scented place where they sat he experienced the subtle power of this intimacy. Not a soul stirred in the empty moonlit street before the house. No sounds disturbed the warm 73 peace of the night. In this secluded spot only there ran the murmur of their voices.
“I could never stand by and see any man unjustly accused and defamed if I knew he was innocent, without lifting up my word in defense,” she proceeded. “But let me ask if on your side you’re treating me fairly?”
Weir could have groaned.
“You have a noble spirit, Miss Hosmer. You’re more courageous and kind than any girl I’ve ever known. Would you have me reveal what my best judgment tells me should remain untold?”
“But what of me? Would you keep it to yourself if my future happiness might turn on it?”
The appeal in her words shook Steele’s heart.
“How does this business affect your happiness? How?” he asked, in perplexity.
Now it was her turn to hesitate. Why should she pause, indeed, before telling to this man what every one else knew. Yet hesitate she did, from a feeling she could but partly analyze. Of her fiancé she had already had disturbing secret doubts that had increased of late: doubts of his habits, his character and the genuineness of his love; so that it was with a little eddy of dissatisfaction and shame that she admitted the relationship. More she questioned her own love as an actual thing. In a startling way, too, this silent, forceful man, so deadly in earnest and so earnestly deadly, so terrible in some aspects, seemed at the instant to dwarf the other in stature and power as if the latter were a plump manikin.
Perhaps at the last minute she had a shiver of dread at what might issue from the engineer’s lips in the way of facts if he took her at her word and told her what she had demanded to know. Did she want to know? 74 Suppose she let the affair rest where it was and went forward to the future in the comfortable assurance of ignorance.