"Ah! I am glad you say that. It is so comfortable to know your benevolence does not depend on our worth. Long ago, and I would have resented such an intimation from anyone; now it gives me the same sort of comfort that a good fire does or, say, a good pudding."
She was regaining her spirits; but there was still a tense ring in her voice which meant intense sincerity.
"Your regard for me has the same basis," said he; and added soon: "I am greatly in earnest in what I say; you ought not to put yourself in the path of fears you cannot master."
"I thank you for the advice. What exactly was it that happened to our letters to-night?"
He ascertained that Adam had given his meagre message discreetly. He could now have comforted her easily with half the truth, but he told all briefly—in whose hands was the keeping of the curious fact of the blank letters, and why he judged it comparatively safe.
Bertha pushed the hood from her head, as if she felt suffocated. She sat down upon a fragment of rock on the verge of the hill, and they both gazed at the silent rolling of the cloud beneath.
"Tricks are folly, and deserve detection," she said at length. "Silence is the only noble form of concealment. Yet our friend, who is a lawyer, told us that if we came here obviously as friendless as we are, rumor would have been cruel. It would have worried our reputation as a dog worries a rat. Every face we met would have been full of suspicion, and—surely it is right to shun morbid conditions?"
Durgan stood uneasy. "People often drop almost all correspondence through indolence," he suggested.
"My sister permitted the trick, I think, simply for my sake. She was distressed by your seals and hearing that the letters had come open. I shall be able to tell her it did not happen at the post-office."
"I should have thought your sister would have trusted her fate in God's hands with perfect resignation."