"How?"
"There was in the box a drug, he told me, possessed of an almost miraculous power over disease of body and mind; so rare and so wonderful that none could buy it, and he knew of but this one dose, of which Messer Basterga had possessed himself. He begged me to take it and to give it to him. He had on him, he said, a fatal illness, and if he did not get this—he must die." Her voice shook. "He must die! Now God help him!"
"You took it."
"I took it." Her face, as her eyes dropped before his, betrayed trouble and doubt. "I took it," she continued, trembling. "If I have done wrong, God forgive me. For I stole it."
His face betrayed his amazement, but he did not release her hands. "Why?" he said.
"To give it to her," she answered. "To my mother. I thought then that it was right—it was a chance. I thought—now I don't know, I don't know!" she repeated. The shade on her face grew deeper. "I thought I was right then. Now—I—I am frightened." She looked at him with eyes in which her doubts were mirrored. She shivered, she who had been so joyous a moment before, and her hands, which hitherto had lain passive in his, returned his pressure feverishly. "I fear now!" she exclaimed. "I fear! What is it? What has happened—in the last minute?"
He would have drawn her to him, seeing that her nerves were shaken; but the table was between them, and before he could pass round it, a sound caught his ear, a shadow fell between them, and looking up he discovered Basterga's face peering through the nearer casement. It was pressed against the small leaded panes, and possibly it was this which by flattening the huge features imparted to them a look of malignity. Or the look—which startled Claude, albeit he was no coward—might have been only the natural expression of one, who suspected what was afoot between them and came to mar it. Whatever it meant, the girl's cry of dismay found an echo on Claude's lips. Involuntarily he dropped her hands; but—and the action was symbolical of the change in her life—he stepped at the same moment between her and the door. Whatever she had done, right or wrong, was his concern now.