It wore such a look indeed, that I glanced over my shoulder thinking that she saw something. Finding nothing, "Mary!" I cried. "What is it? What is the matter?"
"Are you the man who came with Sir John Fenwick to the shore?" she cried, stepping back a pace--she had already risen, "And betrayed him? Dick! Dick, don't say it!" she continued hurriedly, holding out her hands as if she would ward off my words. "Don't say that you are that man! I had forgotten until this moment whom I came to see; who, they said, was here."
Her words stung me, even as her face frightened me. But while I winced a kind of courage, born of indignation and of a sense of injustice long endured, came to me; and I answered her with spirit. "No," I said, "I am not that man."
"No?" she cried.
"No!" I said defiantly. "If you mean the man that betrayed Sir John Fenwick. But I will tell you what man I am--if you will listen to me."
"What are yon going to tell me?" she answered, the troubled look returning. And then, "Dick, don't lie to me!" she cried quickly.
"I have no need," I said. And with that, beginning at the beginning, I told her all the story which is written here, so far as it was not already known to her. She listened in silence, standing over me with something of the severity of a judge, until I came to the start from London with Matthew Smith.
There she interrupted me. "One moment," she said in a hard voice; and she fixed me with keen, unfriendly eyes. "You know that Sir John Fenwick was taken two days later, and is in the Tower?"
"I know nothing," I said, holding out my hands and trembling with the excitement of my story, and the thought of my sufferings.