"There is nothing in this that need hurt you. Believe me in this, at any rate. Only three people are concerned in it. You will have no doubt of your mother. That she told you shows how impossible it was to her, even with Uncle Elbert wanting you so much. You will not mind about your father—not in any personal way. He is a stranger to you. That leaves only me."
Still she said nothing. It seemed to him that he had never looked at so still a face.
"For me, I might make you angry as any—acquaintance might—any stranger. But that is all. It is not … as if we had been friends."
She raised her eyes, and the look in them seemed to give the lie to every word he had said.
"What do you call a friend? Did I not trust you—put myself in your power—fall confidingly in with your hateful plot—after I had been plainly warned not to? Oh, if I had only listened to Mr. Higginson, I should not have the humiliation of remembering that—hour on the yacht!"
The name stung him into instant recollection. He stood staring at her, and his face darkened.
In the first staggering revelation of her look, his sub-conscious mind had leapt instantly to the conclusion that his cunning enemy, having found out his secret, had betrayed it to Miss. Carstairs. Her first words had disposed of that. It was the tortured mother, not the professional sneak, who had been before him with his explanation. But now it rushed over him that he had an infinitely deeper grudge against the vanished spy. For it was Higginson, with his bribe-money, who had broken down the yacht; Higginson who would, in any case, have forced the return to Hunston; Higginson who had given this girl the right to think, as she did think, that she owed her escape wholly to an "accident" to the machinery.
He had thought that he had saved Uncle Elbert's daughter from himself, and lo, his enemy had plucked the honor from him. The world should not be big enough for this man to elude his vengeance.
"You mention Mr. Higginson. Where is he?"
She glanced at him, impersonally, struck by the unconscious sternness of his voice.