"And yet wanted to convict him?"
Craig shook his head. "No, I didn't say that."
"Then what," inquired the rector, "do you take it, inspired him to such an extraordinary action?"
"Oh," said Craig, and as he spoke, for the first time he looked full at Echo. "It all came out afterward. He didn't realise what he was doing. He was drunk."
For an instant Echo's breath stopped. In the unexpected dénouement she had guessed, as at a lightning-flash, Craig's real purpose. Sharply, baldly introduced, the tale stood forth intrusive and malicious, an implied slur upon a man who was not present to refute it. Her whole being flooded with fierce resentment, mingled with an angry amaze that of all there no one else seemed to have caught the insinuation. To the rest it had been at most a gaucherie, a parallel which, if perhaps not felicitous, had been without significance and would be readily forgotten. Therein lay the added sting, that Craig had so accurately judged the outcome. He had guessed how it stood with her and Harry Sevier, and counting on her keener sensitiveness where the latter was concerned, had barbed his shaft for her alone!
The next instant, however, the tension broke with every one talking at once. From this babble the senator emerged with a negro story about a trial with "exterminatin' circumstances," which brought a ripple of laughter, and presently the hostess gave the rising signal.
The room opened upon the ball-room from whose further end already came the squeak of tuned catgut, and beyond this spread the invitingly cool verandas, now beginning to fill with filmy gowns that showed pallidly against the evening dusk, where the bouquet of masculine segars mingled with the dewed scent of shrubbery. Here in the increasing numbers, unobserved as she thought, Echo stepped down onto the cool dark turf and following one of the little meandering bush-bordered paths, came to a rustic bench over which a paper lantern threw flickering rose-coloured shadows. On this she sat down, struggling to regain her lost composure and grateful for the sense of quiet and the cool inspiration of the water, over whose margin the moonbeams danced in elfish ecstasy.
In another moment, however, the silence was broken. A step sounded on the path, and she looked up to see Craig standing before her.