“I certainly do not,” he replied coldly. “I’m surprised to hear you speak so of a woman whom you can scarcely know—”
“Yes, I know her; my God, I have reason to know her! But even when I found her out I did not dream that the plot was as deep as it is. She knew that it was a scheme to test me, and she played me into Pickering’s hands. I saw her only a few nights ago down there in the tunnel acting as his spy, looking for the lost notes that she might gain grace in his eyes by turning them over to him. You know I always hated Pickering,—he was too smooth, too smug, and you and everybody else were for ever praising him to me. He was always held up to me as a model; and the first time I saw Marian Devereux she was with him—it was at Sherry’s the night before I came here. I suppose she reached St. Agatha’s only a few hours ahead of me.”
“Yes. Sister Theresa was her guardian. Her father was a dear friend, and I knew her from her early childhood. You are mistaken, Jack. Her knowing Pickering means nothing,—they both lived in New York and moved in the same circle.”
“But it doesn’t explain her efforts to help him, does it?” I blazed. “He wished to marry her,—Sister Theresa told me that,—and I failed, I failed miserably to keep my obligation here—I ran away to follow her!”
“Ah, to be sure! You were away Christmas Eve, when those vandals broke in. Bates merely mentioned it in the last report I got as I came through New York. That was all right. I assumed, of course, that you had gone off somewhere to get a little Christmas cheer; I don’t care anything about it.”
“But I had followed her—I went to Cincinnati to see her. She dared me to come—it was a trick, a part of the conspiracy to steal your property.”
The old gentleman smiled. It was a familiar way of his, to grow calm as other people waxed angry.
“She dared you to come, did she! That is quite like Marian; but you didn’t have to go, did you, Jack?”
“Of course not; of course I didn’t have to go, but—”
I stammered, faltered and ceased. Memory threw open her portals with a challenge. I saw her on the stairway at the Armstrongs’; I heard her low, soft laughter, I felt the mockery of her voice and eyes! I knew again the exquisite delight of being near her. My heart told me well enough why I had followed her.