“He called himself Campbell, but he told me that it was an assumed name, and not his own. I do not know his real name.”
“Nor do I,” said the young woman, in the tone of one who is recalling events of the past. “I never knew that. But go on, please. What else did he tell you—what else that concerns me, I mean?”
“Nothing. The enemy was upon us hotly, and I had no time for further talk. Oh, yes, he did say that he had persecuted you ‘in a way’—that was his phrase.”
“I wonder what ‘in a way’ signified to him,” said the young woman, with an intensity of bitterness in her tone, the like of which Owen Kilgariff had never heard in the utterance of man or woman before.
“Never mind that,” Evelyn said, an instant later, the look of agony leaving her face as suddenly as it had appeared. “You have more to tell me?”
“Yes. I must make a confession of grave fault in myself, and ask your forgiveness. The man, Campbell, your father, gave me a bundle of papers, as I told you a little while ago, and I have been impertinently asking myself ever since what I ought to do with them. It did not occur to me then that there was no question for me to decide; that my undoubted duty was simply to place the papers in your hands, as I now do”—withdrawing the parcel from a pocket and placing it in her lap. Dorothy had returned it to him for that purpose. He continued:—
“I had not learned my lesson then. I still thought it my duty to guard and protect you, as one guards and protects a child. I reasoned that those papers very probably contained information or statements, true or false, that would afflict you sorely, and I impertinently desired to spare you the affliction. On the other hand, I realised that they might contain, instead, information of the utmost consequence to you and calculated to bring gladness rather than sorrow to your heart. In my perplexity I turned to Dorothy for help. All of us who know Dorothy do that, you know. I sent the papers to her, explaining my perplexity concerning them. I asked her to examine them and determine whether or not they should be given to you.
“Then I learned my first lesson. Dorothy wrote to me, rebuking me with severity for my presumption. She explained to me what I ought to have understood for myself—that the question of what it was best to do with the papers was not mine to decide, or hers; that I had no shadow of right to ask her to read the documents, and she no possible right to read them. She bade me come to Wyanoke and do my duty like a man.
“That is the real reason I am here; for as to my wound, I should have left that to take care of itself. If it had made an end of me, so much the better.”