"And you did not believe them?" Tone very intense and anxious.
"Not one word of them!" Tone very sharp and decided.
"God bless the heart of woman, that leaps to the truth when the boasted brain of man fails!" said Townsend, fervently. "Not every word that he said was a falsehood, but every injurious one was so, if I know myself and what I do. May I tell you what really occurred yesterday on the mountain, so that you may better understand the next version?"
"I shall be very happy to hear your account," she replied, "for the incident must at all events have been a thrilling one."
"It was thrilling indeed, as you suppose," said the lawyer. "People form romances sometimes out of much less, I fancy!" The two stood by the window, looking at the hurrying to and fro of drivers and passengers preparing for some late departures; and so standing, Horace Townsend briefly and rapidly related the facts of the adventure. Margaret Hayley did not turn her eyes upon him as he spoke, and a part of the time she was even drumming listlessly and noiselessly on the glass with those dainty white fingers; but that she was listening to him and to him only was evident, for the speaker could catch enough of her side-glance to know that eye and cheek were kindling with excitement, and he could hear the quick breath laboring in throat and nostrils almost as if she herself stood in some situation of peril. She was interested—he felt and knew it,—not only in the danger of Clara Vanderlyn and the rash bravery in riding of Halstead Rowan, but in him—in the scape-goat of the occasion; and he was stirred by the knowledge to a degree that made a very cool and clear head necessary for avoiding a plunge quite as fatal in its effects as would have been that from the brow of the precipice over the gulf.
"And that is the whole story—a dull one, after all, I am afraid!" he said, not altogether candidly, perhaps, in conclusion.
"Dull? oh no, Mr. Townsend, every thing but dull!" was her reply. "I have seldom been so much interested in any relation. And the facts, so far as they relate to yourself, are very nearly what I should have supposed after hearing the story floating about the hotel."
"You seem to have something of the legal faculty—that of sifting out truth from falsehood, grain from chaff!" said the lawyer, looking at her a little searchingly.
"I? No, not always, though I may be able to do so sometimes," she said, somewhat sadly, and with a sigh choked in its birth. "I have made some terrible mistakes in the judgment of character and action, Mr. Townsend, young as my life is; but perhaps the effect of all that is to make me a little more careful in the reception of loose statements, and so I may have lost nothing. And now—"
"—I have occupied as much of your time as you can spare me this morning," the lawyer concluded the sentence for her, with a smile calculated to put her at her ease in the dismissal.