They thought she but put it off against the time when it should be forced from her lips; but her story did not halt; she was telling it step by step, accounting for every hour of the time.
They waited for her to offer proof of the condition of Ayling's heart. She did not mention it, except to say, when she came to relating the moment of her discovery, that she had not thought of it; that even when she opened the door of his room she did not think directly of his heart; and only when she saw him actually lying there so peacefully dead did she remember the danger in which he constantly lived. She seemed to offer it as proof of the suddenness and completeness of her shock, and in extenuation of the thing she afterward did.
Slowly, gradually, as they listened, and as the light of her omissions made it clear, it had begun to dawn upon them that Bessie Lonsdale was telling the whole of the truth. And by it she sought to disprove something, but not the thing they thought.
She had paused, at the point of her flight, to attempt, a little hopelessly, to make her impulse real to them. She spoke of the inflexible honor of the McCraes, of the great respect which had for generations attached to their name. Then suddenly, as if she saw the utter hopelessness of making them understand, she seemed with a gesture to give up abstractions and obscurities and to find in the depth of her mother's heart the final simple words:
"Don't you see?" she said. "I hadn't thought how my being there at the same inn with Mr. Ayling would look—and then, all at once, it came over me. The whole thing, how it would look to the world, how it would look to the family of my daughter's fiancé,—and that it might mean the breaking of the engagement,—the wreck of her future happiness—don't you see—I didn't think of 'being a rotter'—I only thought of her!"
They uttered, both of them, a sudden exclamation, as if they had been struck. By their expressions one might have thought the woman the accuser and the two men the accused.
"Oh, my dear Mrs. Lonsdale—!" they both began at once, but she stopped them with a gesture of her hand.
"I don't blame you," she said, "I don't blame you. I was a rotter, to run, but I simply didn't think of myself."
Her tone, her gentleness, were the final proof. Only the innocent so graciously forgive.
"And now," she was saying, a great weariness in her voice, "I've told you. Do you want me to go on? It isn't raining any more."