"So," he persisted, "you understand my motive in asking you now: is there nothing more you can tell me—of what you heard and saw, when you were at your window?"
"Nothing—absolutely," she said, again obviously annoyed.
He was close to a refusal to have anything to do with the case. He was sure that she did not deal openly with him. He tried again:
"Nothing more, Miss Sloane? Think, please. Nothing to make you, us, more suspicious of Mr. Webster?"
"Suspect Berne!"
This time she was frank, he saw at once. The idea of the young lawyer's guilt struck her as out of the question. Her confidence in that was genuine, unalloyed. It was so emphatic that it surprised him. Why, then, this anxiety which had driven her to him for help? What caused the fear which, at the beginning of their interview, had been so apparent?
He thought with great rapidity, turning the thing over in his mind as he stood confronting her. If she did not suspect Webster, whom did she suspect? Her father?
That was it!—her father!
The discovery astounded Hastings—and appealed to his sympathy, tremendously.