"Then I don't understand at all," she said, steadily. "I've been thinking that it was he who almost murdered the villain, and gave one of the Spinsters her old place back...."
Charles Garrott stood like a man turned to stone, fascinated gaze upon the eyes in the mirror: girlish eyes, doubtless, but quite unwavering now. And then, in an instant, his face was scarlet from neck to brow. His embarrassment was frightful to see: that of a soul too suddenly stripped bare.
"Oh!... So you've been looking through me—all along. I see ... the Judge didn't confine himself to ... Well, his knowing—was purely an accident. He had, of course, no—"
"And why must my knowing be an accident, too?"
"I—it was simply something you had nothing whatever to do with. And there was an understanding—the—the matter was entirely private. You'll please forget the Judge's—small-talk, and—"
"Not if I live to be a thousand! I'll forget everything—I'll forget my name!—but that!—no, you ask too much of my feelings."
That, indeed, checked the young man's horrible self-consciousness. He saw, with unsteadying bewilderment, that this was no light conversation of hers, that Mary Wing was more deeply moved than he had ever seen her. And suddenly he was aware, by some swift flicker of his intuition, that it was to say this to him, and nothing else, that she had come home, made a holiday, to-day....
"And you told me you had done nothing for me," she said, in the same passionate low voice—"that day—when you had just done everything—what nobody else in the wide world would ever have done for me! And you were—hurt, too...."
She stopped, abruptly. Her face quivered, just perceptibly, but he saw it. Strange and incalculable.... Surely he had tried to do bigger and better things for Mary, than the impromptu display of his primitive passion.... Was this, also, of the primal and everlasting; did this, too, touch the immutable and true?
The helper was making reply, not exactly with insouciance: "Why!—why, but I can't let you think of it—it was nothing! I enjoyed it! I simply didn't think he had behaved to you as he should. Naturally, I didn't like that...."