For some moments neither spoke. But Kate was waiting. She knew there were other questions that must be asked and answered.
“Was it because of the felling of that tree you went away?” Helen asked presently.
Kate shook her head.
“No.”
Helen started up.
“I knew it wasn’t. Oh, Kate, I knew it wasn’t. It was so unlike you. I know why you went. Listen,” she went on, almost excitedly. “You always defended Charlie. You pretended to believe him straight. You—you stuck to him through thick and thin. You flouted every charge made against him. It was because of him you went away. You went to try and help him—save him. All the time you knew he was against the law. That’s why you went. Oh, Kate, I knew it—I knew it.”
Helen was looking up into her sister’s shadowed face with loyal enthusiasm shining in her admiring eyes.
Kate gravely shook her head.
“I believed every word I said of Charlie. As God is my witness I believed it. And I tell you now, Helen, that as long as I live my heart will be bowed down beneath a terrible weight of grief and remorse at the death of a brave, honest, and loyal gentleman. I have no more to say. I never shall have—on the subject. I love you, Helen, and shall always love you. My one thought in life now is your welfare. If you love me, dear, then leave those things. Leave them as part of a cruel, evil, shadowed time, which must be put behind us. All I want you to ever remember of it—when you are the happy wife of your Big Brother Bill—is that Charlie was all we believed him, in spite of all appearances, and he died the noblest, the most heroic death that man ever died.”
Kate bent down and tenderly kissed the beautiful head of fair, wavy hair. Then, without waiting for the astonished sister’s reply, she moved across to the door.