“That wasn’t square. You might have been wrong.”
“He wrote five letters. After that he went to India, to Africa and back to India, where he seemed to find consolation enough.”
Harrigan laid it to his lack of normal vision, but to his single optic there was anything but misery in her beautiful blue eyes. True, they sparkled with tears; but that signified nothing: he hadn’t been married these thirty-odd years without learning that a woman weeps for any of a thousand and one reasons.
“Do you care for him still?”
“Not a day passed during these many months that I did not vow I hated him.”
“Any one else know?”
“The padre. I had to tell some one or go mad. But I didn’t hate him. I could no more put him out of my life than I could stop breathing. Ah, I have been so miserable and unhappy!” She laid her head upon his knees and clumsily he stroked it. His girl!
“That’s the trouble with us Irish, Nora. We jump without looking, without finding whether we’re right or wrong. Well, your daddy’s opinion is that you should have read his first letter. If it didn’t ring right, why, you could have jumped the traces. I don’t believe he did anything wrong at all. It isn’t in the man’s blood to do anything underboard.”
“But I saw her,” a queer look in her eyes as she glanced up at him.
“I don’t care a kioodle if you did. Take it from me, it was a put-up job by that Calabrian woman. She might have gone to his room for any number of harmless things. But I think she was curious.”