He did not speak. His face was white and set as marble. His lips were compressed to a straight line; his eyes burned fiercely. He threw his arm about her and led her quickly to a side door. She thought he had yielded to her entreaties, but he thrust her inside the room without even a murmured word of thanks for her effort to save him, closed the door and turned the key in the lock, then faced the other door through which his visitor must enter.
Already it had been flung open.
[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
"Carlita!"
The name escaped him in a hoarse, gasping cry as she staggered across the room toward him, her frail strength almost exhausted in her effort to reach him. She would have fallen there at his feet, but that he caught her in his arms, and as he would have placed her in a chair she caught the lapels of his coat and held herself close to him by the very strength of despair.
"No!" she gasped. "Give me courage by the strength of your touch to tell my awful story. If you turn from me I shall die before it is finished, and then all will be lost! I told you that I was betraying you to ruin and death, but you would not believe me, would not listen. Great God, Leith, it was so hideously true! Do you know what I have done? Will you despise me, when you have heard, as I despise myself?"
He looked down at her. Knowing what he knew, he still could not keep his arms from supporting her. Knowing what he knew, he could force his lips to say no word of blame.
"Let me hide my face while I tell you!" she cried, concealing it in his bosom. "I have betrayed you! I have sought your ruin! I discovered that you had killed Olney Winthrop—see? I can say it without so much as a shiver now—and I have put you in the hands of the law with every chain of the ghastly story complete. They are coming even now to arrest you. There is not a moment to lose. You must go at once!"
He held her back from him and strove to look at her downcast face.