Mrs. Ralston did not know. She would call there on her way home, she said, and if possible Clarice should come that afternoon. For two hours she staid in the jail talking to Paul and watching Tom arranging the cart load of things which Paul had told her were coming. An easy chair, a lounge, another rug, a vase with flowers to put in it, a small mirror and a soft blanket and white spread for the cot.
“I’m mighty glad of that,” Paul said. “The patchwork thing, made of nobody knows how many women’s dresses, would drive me crazy. I should count the pieces over and over again. I began it this morning after I was awake.”
He was quite cheerful, or tried to appear so, when at last his mother left him, promising to return the next day. Mrs. Ralston had overtaxed her strength and was feeling very weak and sick as she drove to the Percy Cottage, which was shut as closely as if Jack’s dead body were still lying there. Clarice was in bed, with Jack’s photograph on one side of her pillow and Paul’s on the other. Both were soaked with tears, and she was looking very pale and worn when Mrs. Ralston was announced. She had gone into hysterics when she heard of the arrest and had indignantly rejected the charge against Paul as monstrous and impossible. After the hysterics subsided she had sunk into a state of nervous exhaustion, crying a great deal and insisting upon seeing every one who called. There were many who came to offer sympathy and from whom she learned all that was being said and why suspicions had fastened upon Paul.
“Miss Hansford’s niece says she saw him,” was told to her, and her eyes grew larger and blacker and harder, as she listened, and had in them at last a look of doubt and horror.
Remembering Paul’s manner when he left her to find her brother, and knowing Jack’s temper, there crept into her mind a thought that possibly there was a meeting and a quarrel and a shot fired, in self-defense most likely, although that theory did not harmonize with Elithe’s story of deliberate aim and throwing the pistol away.
“She never saw all she pretends to have seen,” Clarice thought, as she tried to reason it out. “She was more in love with Jack than she admitted to me, and because of that she feels vindictive towards Paul, and would like to see him punished.”
This was her conclusion, something mean in her own nature making her think there was the same in Elithe’s. That Paul shot her brother she had little doubt when she reviewed all the evidence brought to her by those who would not have told her everything if she had not insisted upon hearing it.
“It’s my right to know. One was my brother; the other was to have been my husband,” she said, laying stress upon the was to have been, as if the condition were a thing of the past.
It was impossible for her to marry the slayer of her brother, whether it were accidental or intentional, and neither could she bear the disgrace of having a husband who had been arrested as a felon and tried for his life. All this she confided to her mother, who, more politic than her daughter, counseled silence for the present at least.
“Wait and see what the future brings,” she said. “If Paul is honorably acquitted and proved innocent, there is no reason why your relations with him should not continue; if he is proved guilty, we must stand by him to the last for the sake of what he has been to you.”