"You have the right to know it," she said, looking at him out of brilliant, unwinking eyes. "It's about father. He was out there—on the lawn—before he turned on the light in his room. I heard him come in, a minute before Berne went down the back stairs and out to the lawn. And I heard him go to his window and stand there, looking out, at least five long minutes before he flashed on his light."
He waited, thinking she might have more to tell. Construing his silence as reproof, she said, without changing either her expression or her voice:
"I know—it's awful. I should have told you. Perhaps, I've done great harm."
"You've been very brave," he consoled her, with infinite tenderness. "But it happens that I'd already satisfied myself on that point. I knew he'd been out there."
She was dumb, incapable of reacting to his words. Even the fact that he was smiling, with genuine amusement, did not affect her.
"Here comes the grotesque element, the comical, that's involved in so many tragedies," he explained. "Your father's weakness for 'cure' of nervousness, and his shrinking from the ridicule he's suffered because of it—there's the explanation of why he was out there that night."
She could not see significance in that, but neither could she summon energy to say so. She wondered vaguely why he thought it funny.
"That night—rather, the early morning hours following—while the rest of you were in the library, I looked through his room, and I found a pair of straw sandals in the closet—such as a man could slip on and off without having to bend down to adjust them. And they were wet, inside and out.
"Sunday morning, when Judge Wilton and I were at his bedside, I saw on the table a 'quack' pamphlet on the 'dew' treatment for nervousness, the benefit of the 'wet, cooling grass' upon the feet at night. You know the kind of thing. So——"
"Oh-h-h!" she breathed, tremulous and weak. "So that's why he was out there! Why didn't I think? Oh, how I've suspected him of——"