Then came a hurried knocking at the window of the dining-room and a voice, which was like the wind itself become articulate, crying out of the darkness,
"Let me in!"
It was Gell. For the first time in his life Stowell felt a spasm of physical fear. But he remembered something which Gell had said at the door of the railway carriage in Douglas on the day of the trial of the Peel fisherman ("I should have killed the other man"), and that strengthened him. Anything was better than the torture of a hidden sin—anything!
"Go back to the door—I'll open it," he called through the closed window, and then he walked to the porch.
His heart was beating hard. He thought he knew what was coming. But when Gell entered the house he was not the man Stowell had expected—with flaming eyes and passionate voice—but a poor, broken, irresolute creature. His hair was disordered, his step was weak and shuffling, and he was stretching out his nervous hands on coming into the light as if still walking in the darkness.
"I had to come and tell you. She's guilty. She has confessed," he said.
And then he collapsed into a chair and broke into pitiful moaning. It was too cruel. He could have taken the girl's word against the world, yet she had deceived him.
"Did she say .... who...."
"No."
"No?"