There was no answer from behind the mask, and she again addressed the Governor:
"This man must have heard my pleading and pitied me. He thought of me before he thought of his own escape. He took the letter I had come for from the safe and gave it to me, then dragged me to the door and told me to run. So I—I got away."
The room was so still that one heard now, through the closed doors, the muffled click of the telegraph keys in the east-room, and the voices of the clerks calling the tally of figures. Wistfulness and pain had crept into her voice now.
"Next day the newspapers said that the man who had fired the shot had been arrested. I believed this to be true, for though I went one day to the trial, I was in the court-room only a few moments and I could not see the face of the man who was being tried."
The striped figure made a sudden involuntary movement. She had not seen him, then? Could it be that he had been mistaken, that she had not known? Harry's heart began to beat violently.
"I believed it till months afterward, when I came back from Europe. Then I saw a ring which this man had given to his lawyer. It was like the one the man who had given me the letters had worn that night, and this made me afraid that a mistake had been made. I visited the Penitentiary to find out. It was the day of the attack on the warden—when this man was stabbed in his defence."
Again she paused and her eyes shifted to the masked figure. "You must have known me," she said gently. "You must have known my name. Yet you never told. Do you think, whatever it might mean to me—after what you did—that I could keep silent, if the truth may help you now?"
Sevier had no answer. Through and through the maze of his conflicting feeling was stabbing an assurance sharpened with unbelievable joy. He had been thinking her cowardly and calloused with worldly selfishness; here she was risking all—and not for him, Harry Sevier, whom she loved, but for an unknown convict!
The Governor was looking at her with intentness. "You mean that he is not the one who did the shooting?"
"He is not."