Gorham tapped the hot ashes out of his pipe thoughtfully.
“I don’t profess to understand women, but Sheila was angered by the indisputable fact of Harry Owen’s faithfulness to his marriage vows. She knew, as women do know those things, that he was living up to some one else’s standard. And try as she might, she could never ascertain even so much as the name of any woman with whom her husband had been in love. She knew he did not love her, nor ever had. You see? He lived irreproachably—and not for her. So, after she had cunningly questioned me about Harry’s youth, she would say in her thin, plaintive voice: ‘I suppose you won’t tell——’ I used to look at her in amazement. She was so deplorably”—he sought for the word hesitatingly, bashfully—“immodest about it. I shudder when I think how some women lay bare and open to a passer-by the secrets, the petty obscurities, of their lives.
“At last, Owen got the Shearwater.”
“You got it for him,” I remarked.
“I helped,” Gorham confessed. “I couldn’t bear to see our old chum handling steam schooners and colliers in and out of the harbor where we had had our joyous and happy youth, while the rest of us went ahead and kept up the old associations and friendships and got a taste of happiness. So I put in a word for him with the owners and he took over the old packet. She carried passengers, as you know, and he sat each evening at the head of his table in the saloon and chatted with people who admired his trim figure and address. Yet you must understand that all this time he never gave me a hint of the truth. I never knew or suspected that Kitty Melrose had refused to marry him, never dreamed that he loved her. Sheila herself had put the puzzle in concrete form for me.”
“You mean she told you Harry was in love with another woman?” I demanded.
“Of course not—not in so many words,” he returned. “But she had made it clear enough that she thought about it constantly. Naturally enough, I felt there might be grounds—in the event it proved she was right. But here we come to the miracle of the whole affair.”
Gorham stirred uneasily, lighted another pipe, and stared at me intently.
“You are to keep in mind that, from now on, I am telling you precisely what passed under my own eyes, I am not sitting in judgment. I am expressing no opinion and drawing no inferences. As I told you, I left the Shearwater in the last boat.”
“Go on,” I said. “I know nothing about it—except that Owen went mad. That is certain.”