A strange, warm tingling crept through her.
“I—I——” Something seemed to choke her.
“Oh, why did you do it!” he repeated.
Contrary to her determination of but a little while ago, an impulse surged up in her to tell him all she had just learned, to tell him all her plans. She hung for a moment in indecision. Then her old attitude, her old determination, resumed its sway.
“I had a suspicion that I might learn something about father’s case,” she said.
“It was foolishness!” he cried in fierce reproof, yet with the same unnerved quaver in his voice. “You should have known you could find nothing on such a night as this!”
She felt half an impulse to retort sharply with the truth. But the thought of his stumbling all that way in the blackness subdued her rising impulse to triumph over him. So she made no reply at all.
“You should never have come! If, when you started, you had stopped long enough for me to speak to you, I could have told you you would not have found out anything. You did not, now did you?”
She still kept silent.
“I knew you did not!” he cried in exasperated triumph. “Admit the truth—you know you did not!”