“Know what, Mercedes?”
“That Ramon was dead. Did you think I did not know? Oh, my God! I wish that I might have died a thousand times before I did know—before I saw what I did see.”
“Good Heaven! Mercedes, tell me what you mean!”
“Hush, Reginald. I have never called you by that name before, have I? But it seems as if I could never again address you by the name I have loved to use. Oh, my brother, my brother, why did you not kill me also, instead of condemning me to live on, with this horrible secret in my keeping? Instead of forcing me to be the one person in all the world who knows that you have committed a—murder! Oh, God help me!”
Young Danton started back in terror, and his sister buried her face in her arms against the rustic bench and burst into a passion of sobs.
But the young man pulled himself together wonderfully well, and he forced himself to ask quite calmly:
“Mercedes, I have feared that you would fear that I had a hand in the death of Orizaba, but somehow I had disabused my mind of that fear so utterly that I had, for the moment, forgotten it. Do you mean to say that you think I killed him?”
“I know that you killed him, Reginald.”
“You—know—that—I—killed—him? Good God, Mercedes, what do you mean? How can you know a thing which is not true?”
“I saw you.”