“I cannot understand my father taking an alarm of that kind,” Juanita said, presently, after a thoughtful silence. “It is so unlike him. As if any harm could come to me from tramps or gipsies, or even professional burglars, with half a dozen men-servants in the house, and all my jewels safe at the Bank. Theodore, does it mean anything?” she asked, suddenly. “Does it mean that my father has found out something about the murder?”
He was silent, painfully embarrassed by this home question. To answer it would be to break faith with Lord Cheriton; to refuse to answer was in some manner to break his promise to Juanita.
“I must ask you to let me leave that question unanswered for a few days,” he said. “Whatever discovery has been made it is your father’s discovery, and not mine. His lips alone can tell it to you.”
“You know who murdered my husband?”
“No. Juanita, I know nothing. The light we are following may be a false one.”
He remembered how many lying confessions of crime had been made by lunacy since the history of crime began—how poor distraught creatures who would not have killed a worm had taken upon themselves the burden of notorious assassinations, and had put the police to the trouble of proving them self-accusing perjurers. Might not Mrs. Porter be such a one as these?
“Ah! but you are following some new light—you are on the track of his murderer?”
“I think we are. But you must be patient, Juanita. You must wait till your father may choose to speak. The business is out of my hands now, and has passed into his.”
“And he is going to London to-day, you say—he is going upon that business?”
“I have said too much already, Juanita. I entreat you to ask me no more.”