"Why?"
"I don't know, unless it's because I think you've been punished enough already. You'd better wait and rest for a while, at least till the house quiets down. And perhaps we can think of some way.... Don't you think you'd better trust me?"
For another instant suspicious eyes searched Lucinda's, then with a half-nod the girl wilted into a chair. "All right," she acquiesced with the passivity of a child chastened by terror—"just's you say, Mrs. Druce. Only, I don't see why you're being so good to me."
Lucinda had no answer to that. Her motive was not more obscure to that muddled mind than to her own. Unless, of course, it had to do with that enduring image of the bird storm-beaten, weary of wing and bewildered by the dark, risking the debatable mercy of mankind in its stark necessity....
She stood pitiful, contemplating the creature who huddled in the chair, shivering, whimpering a little, gnawing her knuckles, with the dazed eyes of an animal hunted to its last gasp seeking to probe the fearful ambiguity of the future. A murderess by intention, whom the word of any moment might prove a murderess in fact.... And one couldn't condemn or reproach her, one couldn't shrink from her because of the crime that stained her hands, one couldn't even win one's own consent to send her out to chance the retribution she had invited.
Incomprehensible the alchemy of the human heart! Lucinda was making up her mind to help a sinner circumvent justice....
"Tell me something," she said, with no more preface: "You've been calling me Mrs. Druce. How did you learn that was my name? Did Mr. Druce tell you?"
Only the hand of the girl moved in a sign of dissent, and her lips to shape the words: "It was Lynn told me."
"Lynn!"
"Mr. Druce never said as much as a word about you. I don't believe he knows I know now. I thought he didn't want me to know, so I never let on; but of course I did know, all along."