“What is it, Bill? What’s happened?”
“I—I’m late,” were his first shaky words. “Sorry.”
“But what’s happened? Tell me!”
“Naomi—I—” he broke off. “I don’t know how to put it. I feel that just telling you is an insult—”
Ah, she knew now! She knew what was coming.
“That man, Kent!” he stumbled on. “They had me all afternoon, he and Alec McConnell. I had to listen to things he said about you. If I’d been a man, I wouldn’t have given him the chance to say them.”
Eyes clinging to hers, he waited for some question, some denial. He was giving her the chance to strike Marshy’s prosecution off the record without one word of cross-examination. He was urging her with his eyes to give Marshy the lie without even hearing what the man had told him.
All her anguish of the night before had been, like so much feminine anguish, unnecessary. It was in her hands now. She had only to concoct a story of jealousy or an ancient grudge of Kent’s and this boy who had come to mean everything to her would accept it with the gladness of one who doesn’t want to question. Yet she turned her face from him and said nothing.
“I listened until I couldn’t stand it. They made me! [158] ]Then I knocked him down. Swine like that ought to be killed!”
“He’s not swine,” she found herself saying in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “He was probably telling you the truth for what he thought was your own good.”