“Please don’t let’s say anything more about it. I do understand.”
This was not quite true. All that Polly Brewster knew was that, with those clear gray eyes meeting hers, she would have believed his honor clean and high against the world. The presence of the woman, even that dress fluttering in the wind, was susceptible of a hundred simple explanations.
“Ah, that’s all right, then.” There was relief in his tone. “Of course, in a place like this there is a lot of gossip and criticism. And when one runs counter to the general law—”
“Counter to the law?”
“Yes. As a rule, I’m not ‘beyond the pale of law,’” he said, smiling. “But down here one isn’t bound by the same conventions as at home.”
The girl’s hand went to her throat in a piteous gesture.
“I—I—don’t understand. I don’t want to understand.”
“There’s got to be a certain broad-mindedness in these matters,” he blundered on, with what seemed to her outraged senses an abominable jauntiness. “But the risk was small for me, and, of course, for her, anything was better than the other life. At that, I don’t see how the truth reached you. What is it, Miss Polly?”
Rage, grief, and shame choked the girl’s utterance.
Without a word, she ran from the room, leaving her companion a prey to troubled wonder.