"Wheeler!"
"Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!"
"And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public accusation?"
Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I didn't run far."
"You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?"
He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave that other exit—have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be fitted on—let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in the end?—I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough. But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock—'" He seemed to rein in his voice in the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life, for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies—" He shuddered with a violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And, rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in the doorway, looking out.
Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the dearest fellows in the world—the cleverest, the gamest, the most charming. But they were all like poor Christina—fidgety things, nervous and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this story's true!"
Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway, under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked.
"Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish—"
Denny wheeled suddenly round on him.