"How should I know?" she answered; and she said no more, though she still shivered.
"Be sure of it—take my word for it," he said again, earnestly.
"It is nothing to me. And I hate your word indulgent!" cried Leam with a flash of her mother's fierceness.
Mr. Gryce, still watching her, smiled softly to himself. His love of knowledge, as he euphemistically termed his curiosity, was roused to the utmost, and he was like a hunter who has struck an obscure trail. He wished to follow this thing to the end, and to know in what relations she and her old friend stood together—if Alick knew what he, Mr. Gryce, knew now, and had offered to marry her notwithstanding; and whether, if he had offered, Leam had refused or accepted. Observation and induction were hurrying him very near the point. Her changing color, her averted eyes, her effort to maintain the pride and coldness which were as a rule maintained without effort, the spasm of terror that had crossed her face when he had spoken of Alick's fidelity, all confirmed him in his belief that he was on the right track, and that the lines in her hand coincided with the facts of her tragic life. Tragic indeed—one of those lives fated from the beginning, doomed to sorrow and to crime like the Orestes, the Oedipus, of old.
But if he was curious, he was compassionate: if he tortured her now, it was that he might care for her hereafter. That hereafter would come—he knew that—and then he would make himself her salvation.
He thought all this as he still watched her, Leam standing there like a creature fascinated, longing to break the spell and escape, and unable.
"Tell me," then said Mr. Gryce in a soft and crooning kind of voice, coming nearer to her, "what do you think of gratitude?"
"Gratitude is good," said Leam slowly, in the manner of one whose answer is a completed thesis.
"But how far?"
"I do not know what you mean," she answered with a weary sigh.