“Not even if I clear this all up?” Cyril asked, with a wistful look.
“Not even if you clear this all up,” Elma answered seriously. “The difficulty’s on MY side, don’t you see, not on yours at all. So far as you’re concerned, Cyril, clear this up or leave it just where it is, I’d marry you to-morrow. I’d marry you at once, and proud to do it, if only to show the world openly I trust you both. I half faltered just once as you stood there in court, whether I wouldn’t say yes to you, for nothing else but that—to let everybody see how implicitly I trusted you.”
“But I couldn’t allow it,” Cyril answered, all aglow. “As things stand now, Elma, our positions are reversed. While this cloud still hangs so black over Guy, I couldn’t find it in my conscience to ask you to marry me.”
He gazed at her steadily. They were both too profoundly stirred for tears or emotions. A quiet despair gleamed in the eyes of each. Cyril could never marry her till he had cleared up this mystery. Elma could never marry him, even if it were all cleared up, with that terrible taint of madness, as she thought it, hanging threateningly for ever over her and her family.
She paused for a minute or two, with her hand locked in his. Then she said once more, very low, “No, Guy didn’t do it. But why did he run away? That baffles me quite. That’s the one point of it all that makes it so strange and so terribly mysterious.”
“Elma,” Cyril answered, with a cold thrill, “I believe in Guy; I think I know myself, and I think I know him, well enough to say that such a thing as murder is impossible for either of us. He’s weak at times, I admit, and his will was powerless before the magnetic force of Montague Nevitt’s. But when I try to face that inscrutable mystery of why, if he’s innocent, he has run away from this charge, I confess my faith begins to falter and tremble. He must have seen it in the papers. He must have seen I was accused. What can he mean by leaving me to bear it in his stead without ever coming forward to help me fairly out of it?”
Elma looked up at him with another of her sudden flashes of superb intuition. “He CAN’T have seen it in the papers,” she said. “That gives us some clue. If he’d seen it, he MUST have come forward to help you. But, Cyril, MY faith never falters at all. And I tell you why. Not only do I know Guy didn’t do it, but I know who did it. The man who murdered Montague Nevitt is—why shouldn’t I tell you?—Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve!”
Cyril started back astonished. “Oh, Elma, why do you think so?” he cried in amazement. “What possible reason can you have for saying so?”
“None,” Elma answered, with a calmly resigned air. “I only know it; I know it from his eyes. I looked in them once and read it like a book. But of course that’s nothing. What we must do now is to try and find out the facts. I looked in his eyes and I saw it at a glance. And I saw he saw it. He knows I’ve discovered him.”
Cyril half drew away from her with a faint sense of alarm. “Elma,” he said slowly, “I believe in Guy; but really and truly I can’t quite believe THAT. You make your intuition tell you far too much. In your natural anxiety to screen my brother, you’ve fixed the guilt, without proof, upon another innocent man. I’m sure Mr. Gildersleeve’s as incapable as Guy of any such action.”