She stopped crying, and taking away her hands gazed at me wildly.
"Oh, what are you saying?" she moaned. "What is the good of lying to me? Wasn't I by his side when they shot him down? Look here—" She tore back the sleeve of her dress, baring her arm almost to the shoulder, and showing an angry scar that seamed its white beauty. "Here is the very mark of your bullets, and you dare to stand there and lie to my face! Oh, God! are you a man or a devil?"
She sank down on the sofa again, in a very abandonment of passion and grief.
I crushed back a sudden savage desire to take her in my arms and explain everything.
"Look at me," I said, with some sternness, and she raised her head. "Do I seem to you like a man who is lying?" I went on harshly. "I swear to you by my mother's name, by everything I hold sacred, that I was in no way to blame for your father's death. I can't tell you more at present, but before God I'm speaking the literal truth."
The savage earnestness in my voice seemed to have some effect. Into her eyes, which were fixed on mine, there crept a kind of reluctant doubt, and with puzzled gesture she passed her hand across her forehead.
"I—I don't understand," she said faintly. "Guarez—" Then she stopped abruptly.
"Yes?" I said, with an encouraging air. It struck me that Guarez was possibly a gentleman whom it would be healthy to know a little about.
But an obstinate fit seemed suddenly to have come over her, for her lips closed and she got up from the sofa without finishing the sentence.
It was vastly annoying, for I appeared to have been on the very verge of finding out something about my unknown and apparently strenuous past. I couldn't question her further without breaking my promise to Northcote—indeed, my conscience pricked me with having already failed to live up to the strict interpretation of my pledge.