His face went pale under its sunburn.
“What are you doing?” he said, in a low voice that was almost terrible. “Where are you taking me?”
“Into the way you must walk in. Dion—“—even in calling him by his Christian name for the first time her voice sounded quite impersonal—“you’ve done nothing wrong. You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to be ashamed of. Kismet! We have to yield to fate. If you slink through the rest of your years on earth, if you get rid of your name and hide yourself away, you will be just a coward. But you aren’t a coward, and you are not going to act like one. You must accept your fate. You must take it right into your heart bravely and proudly, or, if you can’t do that, stoically. I should.”
“If you had killed Jimmy?”
She was silent.
“If you had killed Jimmy?” he repeated, in a hard voice.
“I should never hide myself. I should always face things.”
“You haven’t had the blow I have had. I know I am not in fault. I know I have nothing to blame myself for. I wasn’t even careless with my gun. If I had been I could never have forgiven myself. But I wasn’t.”
“It was the pony. I know. I read the account of the inquest. You were absolutely exonerated.”
“Yes. The coroner and the jury expressed their deep sympathy with me,” he said, with intense bitterness. “They realized how—how I loved my little boy. But the woman I loved more even than my boy, whom I had loved for ever since I first saw her—well, she didn’t feel at all as the coroner and the jury did.”