"But," said Alice Deringham, "how was it that Mr. Alton did not make sure of the mine?"
"That is just what puzzles Tom. He stayed down here too long, and then there was a flood or something that delayed him. Still, if he had gone when he intended he would have been in time."
Mrs. Forel glanced at her companion curiously, but the girl sat very still with her face turned aside. It was almost a minute before she spoke again.
"And Mr. Alton takes it hardly?"
"Tom doesn't seem to know. Alton, he thinks, must be beaten, but he told him he meant holding on until the last dollar had gone. After all, I can't help feeling sorry for him. It must be hard to get oneself crippled and then lose everything, while Tom declares there was nothing in that other affair about the girl."
Alice Deringham said nothing, but Mrs. Forel saw the blood creep into the polished whiteness of her neck, and wished that she would look up. The girl's rigid stillness was, she fancied, a trifle unnatural, and suggested that there was a good deal behind it.
"Well," she said presently, "that is all I know, and I think Tom is waiting for me."
Mrs. Forel went away, and Alice Deringham sat where she had left her, white in face now, with something that was not wholly unlike horror in her eyes.
"And," she said, "I kept him."
Half an hour passed, and she did not move. Anger against her father and horror of herself were held in check as yet by a tense anxiety as to the end of the struggle she had plunged the man who loved her in. She could picture him standing with his grave quietness face to face with ruin, and holding on until the last faint hope had gone. Still, it seemed almost impossible that he should be beaten, and the curious confidence she had had in him reasserted itself and crept as a ray of brightness into the darkness of her humiliation. That might be borne or grappled with afterwards if Alton came out triumphant, but in the meanwhile she dare not think of herself or what she had done. Presently there was a tapping at the door, and a maid came in.