'Not to Jane?' she questioned.
'Well, what does Jane think at present? Does she suspect?'
She shook her head. 'I don't know. Jane's been rather queer all day…. I've sometimes thought she suspected something. Only if she did, I believe she'd have told me. Jane doesn't consider people's feelings, you know; she'd say anything, however awful…. Only she's deep, too. Not like me. I must have things out; she'll keep them dark, sometimes…. No, I don't know what Jane thinks, really I don't.'
I didn't know either. Another thing I didn't know was what Gideon thought. They might both suspect Clare, and this might have tied Gideon's hands; he might have shrunk from defending himself at the expense of a frightened, unhappy girl and Jane's sister.
But this wasn't my business.
'Well,' I said, 'you may find you have to tell Jane. Perhaps, in a way, you owe it to Jane to tell her. But the essential thing is that you should tell your parents. That's quite necessary, of course. And you should do it at once—this evening, directly you get home. Every minute lost makes the thing worse. I think you should catch the next train back to Potter's Bar. You see, what you say may affect what is in to-morrow morning's papers. This thing has to be stopped at once, before further damage is done.'
She looked at me palely, her hands twisting convulsively in and out of each other. I saw her, for all her seven or eight-and-twenty years, as a weak, frightened child, ignorant, like a child, of the mischief she was doing to others, concerned, like a child, with her own troubles and fears and the burden on her own conscience. I was inclined now to believe in that push.
'Oh,' she whimpered, 'I daren't…. All this time I've said nothing…. How can I, now? It's too awful … too difficult …'
I looked at her in silence.
'What's your proposal, then?' I asked her. I may have sounded hard and unkind, but I didn't feel so; I was immensely sorry for her. Only, I believe a certain amount of hard practicality is the only wholesome treatment to apply to emotional and wordy people. One has to make them face facts, put everything in terms of action. If she had come to me for advice, she should have it. If she had come to me merely to get relief by unburdening her tortured conscience, she should find the burden doubled unless she took the only possible way out.