"A murderer," finished the preacher, with horrible calm. "You were right. I have killed my friend."
She looked at his face, and sickened. But there was strength under that maiden timidity of hers, and she loved this man. She put her arm through his and led him into the parlour; then she went to lock the door again—it gave her a moment's respite—and crept back to the preacher's side, and did not care now if her secret showed plain in her eyes.
"Gabriel, what is it? I have a right to know," she said.
He saw it all now. It was very plain to be read, even by Gabriel Hirst, who had ever been slow to learn these womanish matters. The swift knowledge that she loved him seemed to give him nerve to go forward with his tale.
"I came up Hazel Dene this morning," he began, without any beating about the bush. "I saw you and Griff Lomax—the woman I loved, and the friend I trusted—sitting beside the stream. You were laughing and jesting—at me and my blundering love-ways, I told myself—I thought you had met there often. I waited for Griff on the moor, and we fought. It was close to the edge of Whins Quarry, though it had gone clean out of my head how near we were. The devil entered fairly into me at last, and I closed with Griff a second time and flung him over my shoulder. He dropped clean into the quarry, and I heard him splash into the water at the bottom."
She loosened her hold of him and fell back with a moan. There could be no doubting his story.
Soon she began to frame excuses for him, with a woman's nimble wit. She spoke after a long while.
"Gabriel, it was a fair fight. You did not know of the quarry; you—— Gabriel, did you do it for my sake?"
"Not for your sake," he muttered huskily. "Don't think, child, that the sin was for your sake; that couldn't be. I was mad with jealousy."