"Oh, Mr. Cleek, oh!" she said faintly. "You surely can't think—— A dear lovable boy like that! You can't believe that Geoffrey Clavering had anything to do with it?"
"I hope not, for, frankly, I like the boy. But one thing is certain: if he didn't kill the man, he knows who did; knows, too, that there is a woman implicated in the crime."
"A woman! Oh, Mr. Cleek, a—a woman?"
"Yes—perhaps two women!"
"Women and—and a deed of violence, a deed of horror, like that? No! Women couldn't. They would be fiends, not women. I hold too high an estimate of my sex to let you call them that! And for him, for Geoffrey Clavering, there is but one woman in all the world! Even you shan't hint it of her! No, not even you."
"Hush! I am hinting nothing. Now that I have seen Lady Katharine I would almost as soon think evil of you as of her."
There was a little summerhouse close at hand. He saw that she was faint, shocked, overcome, and gently led her to it, loathing himself that even for one moment he had brought pain within touch of her.
"Who knows better than I how false appearances may be?" he said. "Who should be less likely to take suspicious circumstances for proof?"
"Oh, but to suspect, even to suspect, Kathie—the dearest and the sweetest girl on earth."
"Again I dispute that!" he threw back with repressed vehemence. "And again I declare that I am not swayed by facts, black as they may be, black as they undoubtedly are. If I believed, should I come here and openly tell you of these things? My duty is to the law. Should I not carry proofs there if I believed that they were proofs? But my faith is as a rock. Shall I prove it to you? Then look! I know that you will tell me the truth; and it is because of that, because in my heart I know it is a truth which you can and will face openly and with no cause for fear, that I have declined to hold this thing of sufficient importance to be called a clue, and as such to be handed over to the police. Miss Lorne—Ailsa—tell me, will you—have you ever seen this thing before?"