She left me before I could answer her question, but she left me without a ray of hope. I had made up my mind that I would never marry any one. And I was sure, with the memory of Paul's cold, questioning looks in our recent interview, that he would never come to me again.
But he did come.
We met in the sunny bookroom where I had first led him so long—it seemed very long—ago. I was sitting in the window seat trying listlessly to read, and listening heartbrokenly to the gay music of a mocking-bird in the tree outside, when his step sounded in the hall, and, while I stood, half risen to fly, he came in quietly and stood before me with his boyish and disarming smile.
My knees gave way, and I dropped back into my place, the book falling to the floor. I was trembling all over.
“Don't say you won't let me talk to you, Janice,” he pleaded, and his face was white with earnestness. “Don't try to run away from me. You must in all fairness hear me out.”
“There is nothing for me to listen to,” I stammered; “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Perhaps it is nothing to listen to,” he said, “but it is the most important thing to me in the world. It means my life—that's all.”
“To talk to me?”
“Yes. For God's sake, let us play no tricks with each other now. There has been too much disguise between us. I mistook you for a wicked woman—yes—but you knew that I mistook you, you knew that I loved you better than my own soul, you knew that I suffered damnably, and you did not undeceive me. I kept a policeman's guard upon you—yes—I let you find the paper, I let you get the translation, and, when I could force my heart to give in to my sense of duty, I tracked you down, and found you with the treasure. I saw your double go out through the kitchen-garden that night, and I thought, as I had thought from the beginning, that she was you. I followed her to the bridge. I followed her back to the house. I let her go into her hiding-place, and I set two men to watch that entrance while I went out to make sure of Maida and Jaffrey. Long before that night I had discovered the other opening to the passage—the opening in Robbie's window sill—-and had fastened it up so that none of the gang should light upon it. When I came back at my leisure, thinking to find my quarry in the hands of my two men, they told me that she had not come out, that they had waited according to orders, and had heard a long murmur of voices in the wall. Then I betook myself to the other opening, and dropped on you from above.” Here, all at once, his self-control broke down. He came and took my hands, drawing them up against his heart so that I rose slowly to my feet in front of him. “Do you know what it was like to me to feel that I was handing you over to justice? Even then, I loved you. Even then your beauty and your eyes—Oh, Janice, I can't think of the agony of it all. Don't make me go over it, don't make me explain it in cold blood. In cold blood? There is n't a drop of cold blood in my body when I hold your hands! Are you going to forgive me? Are you going to let me begin again? May I have my chance?”
I laughed bitterly enough. “Your chance to win the daughter of Madame Trème?”