He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel. He had turned his back on Maxine, and volumes could not have said more than what was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and turning away.
The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the mantelpiece and faced her again. There was no trace of emotion on his face, but the trace of a struggle with it. Maxine’s eyes were filled with tears.
“I am sorry,” said he, “that I should have dragged this subject before you at all. Why should I torment your heart as well as my own?”
She did not reply for a moment. She was tracing the vague pattern of the carpet with her eyes, her chin resting on her hand, and the light from above made a halo of the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning charm.
Then she said, speaking slowly, “I am not sorry. Surely if such things are, they ought to be known. Why should I turn away my face from suffering? I have never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as a girl can, but what you tell me is beyond what I have ever heard of, or read of, or dreamed. Tell me more, give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you, I cannot yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. I am like Thomas; I must put my fingers in the wounds.”
“Are you brave enough to look at material evidence?” asked Adams.
“Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others if not my own——”
He left the room and in a few minutes later returned with a parcel. He took from it the skull he had brought with him through everything to civilization.
Maxine’s eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but she did not turn pale, and she looked steadfastly at it as Adams turned it in his hands and showed her by the foramen magnum the hacks in the bone caused by the knife.
She put out her finger and touched them, then she said, “I believe.”