"Forgive me, Jacqueline, for I have brought heavy trouble upon you. But with God's aid I am going to save you both—your father and you—and take you away somewhere where all the past can be forgotten."
She sighed heavily, and I felt a tear drop on my hand.
"Jacqueline!" I cried.
"Ah, M. Hewlett"—the weariness of her voice went to my heart—"it might have been different—if——"
"If what, Jacqueline?"
"If there had not been the blood of a dead man between us," she moaned. "If—you—had not—killed him!"
Her words were a revelation to me, for I learned that she had mercifully been spared the full remembrance of what had happened in the Tenth Street apartment. She thought that it was I who had killed Louis d'Epernay.
And how could I deny this, when to do so would be to bring to her mind the knowledge of her own dreadful guilt?
The dotard stirred and muttered, and she whispered to him and soothed him as though he were a child. Presently he began to breathe heavily, as old men breathe in sleep. But Jacqueline crouched there in the same motionless silence, and I knew that she was awake and suffering.
And then my watch began hammering again, just as the alarm-clock had hammered on that awful night in my apartment when I crouched outside the door, not daring to go in. My mind was working against my will and picturing a thousand possibilities.