There had been a wondrous new development of strength and beauty in her as she spoke, and Fair had watched her with profoundest feeling.
“Kate, Kate, you wrong me, upon my honor!” he cried when she ceased. “The promise that I made you was one that I could keep. There is a mystery, an awful something in my life, that has through all these years kept me so falsely true, that, being true to one great object fixed on me by my fate, I’ve been compelled to seem what I am not to all the world. To get you, Kate, to rest at last my broken heart upon your love, I was this very night to break the self-imposed conditions of my weird life-purpose. God! how I counted them, these long, slow days, waiting for this one! An hour ago I still supposed that I could fold you on my heart tonight and tell you everything! I thought that I could say the word that would dispel your doubts and make you—you only in the world see me as God does. But now I cannot. Be brave and hear me, Kate,” he added, holding her arm, which was trembling under the influence of his own great passion. “I am a criminal. I have done that which must make you despise me, must drive me from the society of men, and bring me to the gibbet.”
Forgetting all her previous moods, Miss Mettleby allowed the choking man to lean against her as she cried. “You are ill. Take my arm—so. And oh, believe me, that nothing that you imagine you have done, nothing that you could do, can rob you of one poor and weak, but brave and true girl’s friendship. Do let me call your wife. Yes, I will call her—let me. And you must tell her. Tell her—her, not me.”
“Stop! Stop!” cried Fair, frantically holding the struggling girl, who was making for the door; “and be quiet. Hear me. It’s all that I can say, but it will show you, Kate, that, if I am a criminal, I mean you no dishonor. You want to call my wife. I have no wife! She is not——”
He was cut short by Baxter, who stood at the door at that moment and announced, “Mr. Travers.” Travers entered smiling, and Fair, with a completeness of mastery over his feelings which Kate could not believe true, sang out: “Travers, old chap, glad to see you! What’s the good word?”
Miss Mettleby slipped out of the library and ran up to her little room. She knew that now it would be impossible to see him again that night, as it would be late when the last guest had gone. Throwing herself on her bed, she tried to make it all out. His crime—his saying that he had no wife—the awful something in his life which, for her sake, he was to have broken from that very night—what did it all mean?
She could grasp no idea out of the chaos long enough for it to take shape in her mind. She drifted helplessly down the torrent of tumultuous fears and hopes and hungers, knowing only one thing—that she loved him, she loved him.
CHAPTER III
The man who now came in was that lovable, unlucky, wonderfully clever Dick Travers, who was forty and a failure when a manager, miraculously experiencing a lucid interval, brought out his five hundredth play, “The Idiot,” since which time five hundred managers coquet with him for each new play. But all this was after the time now reached. Dick Travers was still a failure whom Fair had met before his own ascent to opulence, and to whom he was drawn by several ties, among which was their common taste for etchings in dry-point and the more tangible common interest in yachting and hatred for most things foreign.
“Pretty well right, thanks,” replied Travers to Fair’s welcome, adding immediately with much excitement, “and by Jove, old man, have you seen the evening papers? You’ve got a lot of those Empire shares, haven’t you? Well, the blooming things went up to two hundred and eighty today.”