"Good God, Lois, why do you not speak to me? I must know the truth, you didn't kill him."
She shrank back, laughing horribly. The pent-up excitements of the night had broken her nerve at last. For an instant he feared almost for her reason.
"Lois, Lois dear, Lois, listen to me; I have come to help you. I can help you. Lois, will you not hear me patiently?"
He caught her to him as he spoke and pressed her burning forehead to his lips. So she lay for a little while, rocked in his arms as a child that would be comforted. A single ray of sunshine filtered through a slit in the wall above, dwelt for a moment upon her white face and showed him all the pity of it.
"Lois, why should you speak like this because I come to you? Is it so difficult to tell the truth?"
"Did they tell you to ask me that, Alban?"
"It was forced from me, Lois. I don't believe it. I would as soon believe it of myself. But don't you see that we must answer them? They are saying it, and we must answer them."
She struggled to be free, half resenting the manner of his question, but in her heart admitting its necessity.
"I knew nothing of it," she said simply, "you may tell them that, Alban. If they offered me all the riches in the world, I could not say more. I don't know who did it, dear, and I'd never tell them if I did."
A little cry escaped his lips and he caught her close in his arms again. It was not to say that he had believed the darker story at which imagination, in a cowardly mood, might hint, but this plain denial, from the lips of Lois who had never told him a lie, came as a very message of their salvation.