“Something that I hate saying. Joan, last night a man—a man I have never seen before—came to see me.”
She stiffened. The faint smile was gone; her face had become as a mask, hard and cold, icy.
“Yes?”
“A man who had something to tell me—you will do me the justice to believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him, but he would not be silenced. He told me lies! foul lies about you! lies!” Johnny said passionately, “things which I, knowing you, know to be untrue. Yet he told them. I drove him out of the place. Then he came back. He had remembered what his errand was—blackmail. He came to me for money. But—but he did not stay, and then—” Johnny paused. He had reached the window, and stood staring out into the garden, yet seeing nothing of its beauty.
“You know,” he went on, “that I do not ask you nor expect you to deny—there is no need. What he said I know to be untrue. The man was a villain, one of the lowest, but he has been paid.”
“Paid?” she said. She stared.
“Not in money,” Johnny said shortly, “in another way.”
“You—you struck him?”
“No. I would have; but he saw the danger and fled from it—fled from the punishment that I would have meted out to him to a harder that Fate had in store for him.”
“I don’t understand.”