‘Did he not escape from prison?’
‘He did.’
‘And yet,’ exclaimed Barbara angrily, ‘you dare to say with one breath that you are innocent, whilst with the next you confess your guilt! Like the satyr in the fable, I would drive you from my presence, you blower of true and false!’
He caught her hands again and held her firmly, whilst he drew her out of the shadow of the archway into the moonlight of the court.
‘Do you give it up?’ he asked; and, by the moon, the sickle moon, on his pale face, she saw him smile. By that same moon he saw the frown on her brow. ‘Miss Barbara, I am not Ezekiel Babb’s only son!’
Her heart stood still; then the blood rushed through her veins like the tidal bore in the Severn. The whole of the sky seemed full of daylight. She saw all now clearly. Her pride, her anger fell from her as the chains fell from Peter when the angel touched him.
‘No, Miss Jordan, I am guiltless in this matter—guiltless in everything except in having deceived you.’
‘God forgive you!’ she said in a low tone as her eyes fell and tears rushed to them. She did not draw her hands from his. She was too much dazed to know that he held them. ‘God forgive you!—you have made me suffer very much!’
She did not see how his large earnest eyes were fixed upon her, how he was struggling with his own heart to refrain from speaking out what he felt; but had she met his eye then in the moonlight, there would have been no need of words, only a quiver of the lips, and they would have been clasped in each other’s arms.
She did not look up; she was studying, through a veil of tears, some white stones that caught the moonlight.