“I know,” Editha said, with starting tears, then, with rising color, “if you had only dropped me a line, I would have taken care that my offerings reached you safely after that.”
“You know the old saying, ‘one may as well be neglected as forgotten;’ I never mistrusted that they had been sent and failed to reach their destination, and so imagined a good many things I had no right to, and——”
“And were too proud to remind me of my negligence,” Editha interrupted, with a smile.
“Doubtless some enemy has done this, or they could not all have missed coming to me. Am I forgiven for doubting my stanch little friend?” he asked, gently.
“Freely; I could not blame you under the circumstances.”
“Then let us talk of something else,” Earle said for he began to mistrust from Editha’s manner who had been the guilty one. “Tell me of Mr. Forrester and of yourself during these years.”
And thus their conversation drifted to other subjects, and, as they conversed, their old freedom of manner returned in a measure—in a measure, I repeat, for there could not be quite the former carelessness and sparkle, while each was trying to conceal the secret which their hearts held, and which, for the time, at least, they felt they must not reveal.
Earle told her of his life in prison—of how he had spent his time—of the knowledge he had acquired, and something of his plans for the future.
“Earle,” she said, glancing up at him through the tears she could not restrain, when he had completed his account, “you have borne it so nobly, this suffering for another, that I want to tell you how proud I am of you; and Uncle Richard would say the same thing if he were living.”
“Thank you,” he said, with emotion; “it is almost worth having been a prisoner for three years to hear you say that. If only the world might feel as assured of my innocence as you do, and hold out the same friendly hand of welcome,” he concluded, with a sigh.