“I know what you are thinking, Mr. Holt. You are asking yourself if I am mad, if I am a criminal, what my reason can be, and why I haven’t gone to Rossland, or Captain Rifle, or some one else. And the only answer I can make is that I have come to you because you are the only man in the world—in this hour—that I have faith in. Some day you will understand, if you help me. If you do not care to help me—”
She stopped, and he made a gesture.
“Yes, if I don’t? What will happen then?”
“I shall be forced to the inevitable,” she said. “It is rather unusual, isn’t it, to be asking for one’s life? But that is what I mean.”
“I’m afraid—I don’t quite understand.”
“Isn’t it clear, Mr. Holt? I don’t like to appear spectacular, and I don’t want you to think of me as theatrical—even now. I hate that sort of thing. You must simply believe me when I tell you it is impossible for me to reach Cordova alive. If you do not help me to disappear, help me to live—and at the same time give all others the impression that I am dead—then I must do the other thing. I must really die.”
For a moment his eyes blazed angrily. He felt like taking her by the shoulders and shaking her, as he would have shaken the truth out of a child.
“You come to me with a silly threat like that, Miss Standish? A threat of suicide?”
“If you want to call it that—yes.”
“And you expect me to believe you?”