"But what is it? What do you mean?" he asked, with swift-growing uneasiness.
"I do not say that I blame you for failing to see and understand," she evaded. "No doubt you, too, have suffered."
"Yes, I've—But that's nothing. It's Jenny!" he exclaimed, fast on the barbed hook. "Good God! if it's true I've made her suffer—But how? Why? I don't understand."
Mrs. Gantry studied him with a gravity that seemed to include a trace of sympathy. There was an almost imperceptible tremor in her voice.
"Need I tell you, Mr. Blake, how a girl of her high ideals, her high conception of noblesse oblige, of duty (you saved her life as heroically as—er—as a fireman)—need I point out how grateful she must always feel toward you, and how easily she might mistake her gratitude for something else?"
"You mean that she—that she—" He could not complete the sentence.
Mrs. Gantry went on almost blandly. "A girl of her fine and generous nature is apt to mistake so strong a feeling of gratitude for what you no doubt thought it was."
"Yet that morning—on the cliffs—when the steamer came—"
"Even then. Can you believe that if she really loved you then, she could doubt it now?"
"You say she—does—doubt it? I thought that—maybe—" The heavy words dragged until they failed to pass Blake's tense lips.