She promised readily to let me have the first word with the lad when he called next day. And as for undertaking to have nothing more to do with him if the charge proved to be true, she made nothing of that--because, as she said, it meant nothing.
"A Jim who had done that would not be my Jim at all," she explained gaily, "but quite a different Jim--a James, sir."
Certainly, a girl's faith is a wonderful thing. And hers so far affected me that I regretted I had not taken a bolder course, and, showing the photograph to the Colonel, had the whole thing threshed out on the spot. Possibly I might have saved myself a very wretched hour or two. But no; on second thoughts I could not see how the boy could be innocent. I could not help piecing the evidence together--the damning evidence, as it seemed to me; the certain identity of Jim with the original of the photograph, the arrival of the latter from Frome, where the lad had spent the last weeks previous to his examination, the fears he had expressed before the ordeal, and his success beyond his hopes at it; these things seemed almost conclusive. I had only the boy's character, his father's training, and his sweetheart's faith, to set against them.
His sweetheart's faith, did I say? Ah, well! when I came down to breakfast next morning, whom should I find in tears--and she, as a rule, the most equable girl in the world--but Kitty.
"Hallo!" I said. "What is all this?"
At the sound of my voice she sprang to her feet. She had been kneeling by the fireplace groping with her hands inside the fender. Her cheeks were crimson, and she was crying--yes, certainly crying, although she tried by a hasty dab of the flimsy thing she calls a pocket-handkerchief to remove the traces.
"Well!" I said, for she was dumb. "What is it, my dear?"
"I have--torn up a letter," she answered, a little sob dividing the sentence into two.
"So I see," I answered dryly. "And now, I suppose, you are sorry for it."
"It was a horrid letter, father," she cried, her eyes shining like electric lamps in a shower--"about Jim."