A Fool There Was

by Porter Emerson Browne

To her Blake turned.

"Well?" he interrogated.

"I've known Martha Dale for sixteen years. She, Kathryn, and I were children together…. I think you knew her, too…. She's not the woman to make a charge like that unless it's true."

Blake shrugged his shoulders. A great pain shot through his heart; a great numbness clamped his brain. He had heard things himself. He had seen people who themselves had seen, or thought that they had seen. One man he had knocked down. With two more, his good friends, he had quarreled irrevocably. And in his own soul, something had told him that it was he who was wrong.

He said to Elinor; even as over and over and over he had said to himself:

"There's some mistake. There must be some mistake. It's impossible."

She eyed him shrewdly.

"There's no mistake" she returned. "She talked with him. She saw him with this woman. They were at the same hotel where Martha stayed. And the morning after she came, they left…. There's no mistake."

"But Jack wouldn't do a thing like that," he protested.

"You're a bad liar, Tom. You knew."