"John, dear," she said softly, "there is some mystery here that I don't understand; I want to know all about it—all about you. I trust you as I trust no other man on earth; there can be nothing you are afraid to tell me."
Having struck me that unconscious blow, she sat down calmly, and smiled at me, and waited; I thought that never had poor prisoner trembled before his judge as I trembled then.
"I want you to throw your mind back," I began at last, seeing that I must get the business over, "to the night when last you saw Gregory Pennington."
She started, and looked at me more keenly; leaned forward over the table beside her, and kept her eyes fixed on my face.
"I remember the evening well," she said. "We stood together in the grounds of the house; he left me to go into that house to see my guardian. And I have never seen him since."
"When you met Gregory Pennington that night," I went on, "I lay in the darkness quite near to you, a forlorn and hunted wretch, clad in a dress such as you have never seen—the dress of a convict."
She got up quickly from her chair, and retreated from me; yet still she kept her eyes fixed on my face. And now I began to see that my cause was hopeless.
"I had broken out of my prison that day, a prison far away in the country. I was hunted, and hopeless, and wretched; the hand of every man was against me. I had taken money that did not belong to me, and I had received a savage sentence of ten years' imprisonment. I had served but one, when the life and the manhood in me cried aloud for liberty; and on that night when you met Pennington in the garden I was free."
"Why were you in that place at all?" she whispered.
"That place was as good as any other, if it could provide me with that I wanted, food and clothing," I answered her. "I saw young Pennington go into the house; a little later I followed him. Only, as you will understand, I could not enter by the door; I broke into the place like the thief I was."