“He put it together again,” he answered in the same tone. “I—we are all indebted to him. Deeply indebted to him! I don’t know that there is anything more to be said,” he continued dully, “except that I have come to take you back. I was coming last evening, but the snow prevented me.”
“And that is all—you have to say?”
He raised his eyes to hers with so much sadness in their depths, with such utter dejection in his looks, that in spite of all her efforts to keep it alive, her anger drooped. “Except that I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry. We have treated you—badly amongst us.”
“You!” she said vindictively.
“I, if you like. Yes, I. It is true.”
She called up the remembrance of the severity with which he had judged her and the violence of which her wrist still wore the traces. She pictured the disgrace of the prison and her fears, the nights of apprehension and the days of loneliness, ay, and the insolence of the wretch who had just left her—she owed all to him! All! And yet she could not keep her anger hot. She tried. She tried to show him something of what she felt. “You!” she repeated. “And now you think,” bitterly, “that I shall bear to go back to the place from which you sent me? Sent me in open disgrace—in that man’s charge—with no woman with me?”
“God help me!” he said. “I know not what to think or do! I thought that if I took you back myself, that would perhaps be best for all.”
She was silent a moment, and then, “I have been very, very unhappy,” she said in a different tone. And even while she said it she wondered why she complained to him, instead of accusing him, and blaming him.
“I believe it,” he said slowly. “We have wronged one another. Let it stand at that.”
“You believe, you do believe now,” she said, “that I had no hand in stealing him?”