He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the window,—holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused in her.
"You mean well," she said, quietly, after a pause. "But you do not know my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect it,"—remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given.
"How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone which both you and he wished forgotten."
She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it lost color, and that the delicate jaws closed with the firmness of a steel spring.
"There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two.
The old man came close to her after a while, and put his hand gently on her hair; streaked with gray as it was, she seemed nothing but a child to him still.
"You're growing like your mother, Lotty," he said.
After a long while she spoke again, but under her breath, as if half talking to herself.
"We had a child once, Jerome and I," she said.
"I know," the Captain rejoined, quickly turning his eyes from her face, and, after waiting for her to go on, added, "Never but the one,—I know."