"He could give him none that would do anyone any good."
"Might that not be a matter of opinion?"
"I don't see that folks who don't know what they are doing can have a right to an opinion about the results."
There was then a silence. The sun had long set on the valley, but from this eminence its last rays were still seen mingling with a foam of crimson cloud in a vista of the western hills. Both the man and the woman had their faces turned to the great red cloud-flower in which the light of day was declining. The mountains were solemn and tender; the valleys dim and wide. It was not a scene on which the sober mind could gaze without gaining for the hour some reflection of the greatness and earnestness of God.
But the world about could only be environment to their thought, not for a moment its object. Durgan was roused in spirit. The quiescent temper which he had sought to obtain in compensation for a stormy and disappointed youth was lost for the time. This woman, who bore the odium of a cruel and dastardly deed, was still intent on shielding the real doer. Durgan looked at the splendid arena of the mountains and the manifest struggle of light and darkness therein; the many tracks of suspicion in which his thoughts had all day been moving gathered together.
"Miss Claxton, are you willing to tell me all you know about Charlton Beardsley?"
She looked at him for a moment as if trying to read his thoughts, then looked back at the outer world, as if moved by his question only to profound and regretful reverie.
"About Charlton Beardsley I know very little," she said, in a voice touched as with compassion; "very, very little, Mr. Durgan; but I had once occasion to ask your wife something about him, and she told me, I believe truly, that he had been brought up, an orphan, in an English charity school, that he had no relatives that he knew of and no near friends. That was all she could tell me. He was by taste a somewhat solitary mystic, I believe, only sought after by those who had discovered his delusions and wished to be deluded by them. You see, I can easily tell you all I know; it is not much."
Durgan sat watching her, too entirely amazed at both words and manner to find speech. Just so a good woman, treading the violets of some neglected graveyard, might speak of the innocent dead who lay beneath.