He turned to Helen in cold triumph. “I knew it—I knew it,” he exulted. “Don’t you see now, Helen, how you are deceiving yourself? If there was a message for you, why shouldn’t it come? I tried to help you—to put myself in sympathy—you saw how useless it was.”
But Helen had been too near the unseen, too far across the dread borderland. Doubt could not touch her again. She had stood in the edge of the light. She had felt. Almost she had heard and had seen. She knew. She shook her head, without troubling to answer him or look toward him. She shook her head and she smiled.
“Where’s Latham?” Pryde said in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone.
She answered him as crisply, and as commonplace in manner and word.
“He is going to take poor Hugh away in his car; he has gone to get it ready.”
“Oh!”
“He is going to take him to some place where he will be safe until we can find the evidence that will clear him.”
“But there isn’t any,” Pryde said with truculent brutality; and his eyes measured yet again, gloatingly, the distance and the angle from the writing-table to the fireplace.
“I know there is,” Helen said quietly.
“There can’t be,” Stephen stormed, almost losing grip of himself—very nearly had he reached his breaking-point. “I tell you, there can’t be.”