"I nod telling you account tha's nod business for you."
"Well, Numè!"
"I getting vaery lonely, and meeting only by accident with Mr. Sinka."
"Does your father know?" the other asked, relentlessly.
The girl approached her with terror. "No! Oh, Mrs. Davees, don't tell yet." After a time she asked her: "How did you know?"
"I learned it by accident through a clerk at the consulate. How he knows—and how many others know of it, I cannot say." She almost wrung her hands in her distress. She saw it was no use being angry with Numè, and that she might do more by being patient with her. She had learned merely the fact of Sinclair's being in the woods each day with a Japanese girl. This had set her to thinking; Koto's and Numè's long absences in the country each day—a few questions and a handful of sen to the runners who had been loitering in her vicinity for some days now with their vehicles, and she soon knew the truth.
Just how far things had gone between Sinclair and Numè she must find out from the girl herself, though she was not prepared to trust her completely when she realized how Numè had deceived her all these weeks. She was determined to help Cleo, and felt almost guilty when she remembered that she had urged the girl to make the trip which might result in so much disaster to her, for Jenny Davis knew Cleo Ballard well enough to know that it would break her heart to give Sinclair up now, after all the years she had waited for him.
"Numè," she said, quite sadly, "don't look at me so resentfully. I want only to do my duty by you and my friend. Let me be your friend. Oh! Numè, if you had confided in me we could have avoided all this."
Numè had a tender spot in her heart for Mrs. Davis, who had always been so good to her.
"Forgive Numè," she said, impulsively, and for a moment the two women clung together, the American woman almost forgetting, for the moment, everything save the girl's sweet spontaneity and impulsiveness. Then she pulled herself together, remembering Cleo.