Yes, the pistol was the Señora's. Mr. Montgomery had bought it for her a little while before. Yes, the Señora had made sure to save Mr. Montgomery and but for the Señorita Fenwick it would have been. For she had many friends, friends of power, he said. At that Mr. Dingley grew paler, and started to speak, but then he seemed to change his mind. Father looked at him, and I wondered then had the trouble been that Mr. Dingley had been one of those friends of hers. When the police came and we left the place, Mr. Dingley and father separated without a word, and father took me home alone in the carriage.
EPILOGUE
TWO YEARS
All the experiences which I had gone through with, with such apparent lack of feeling, seemed to take their revenge on me at once. For a while I was very ill, delirious with fever; and when I was myself again and the doctor would let me be talked to, the new trial was all over, and Johnny Montgomery had been acquitted a week ago. It was Hallie, all smiles, with her hands full of roses, who brought this news in to me; and in a few days, she said, Jack Tracy had told her, Montgomery was going to leave the city. This set me wondering whether that night in the carriage and everything we had told each other then had been no more than part of my fever visions.
At last I gathered courage enough to ask father if Johnny Montgomery had inquired about me. Father looked annoyed, and said, "Yes," that he had been sending every day, and that he had asked if he might see me when I was able, but, father said, he had thought it best to refuse. That made me so miserable I began to be ill again, and the doctor was afraid I would have a relapse; so finally father gave his permission for me to see Johnny.
It was strange and unreal to think that it was actually he, gaunt and white and serious-looking, standing beside my bed and gazing down at me with timid eyes. We were both so glad to see each other we were a little afraid. The shadow of things that had happened was over us still and made us grave.
I must have looked very thin, for he took my hand as if he thought it would break and his voice was hardly above a whisper. He said whatever good came of him and whatever happiness he had hereafter he would owe to me, and that would be more than owing me his life; but father was right in saying that a man with the reputation he held in this city had no right to see or speak with me. He had only come to thank me and to say good-by. He was going away to South America.
"But father does not know you," I said, "and I am sure you are quite a different man from what any one here thinks you. And if you go away it will break my heart."
At that he looked happier and said if I felt that way he would go just the same, but it would make him want to come back again. And then, perhaps, he might be more the sort of man my father would give his daughter to. A friend of his father's, he said, had offered him an overseer's place in his mine in South America; and would I forget all about him in two years, he wanted to know?