"Believing me to be a—murderer?"
She shivered.
"We will never mention that between us," she groaned. "We will begin a new life—a new life in a new country—and forget. Oh, Leith, there is no more time! For God's sake—for my sake—go!"
He smiled and kissed her.
For some reason the ghastly whiteness had disappeared from his countenance. He held her very closely in his arms, observing that she did not shrink from the embrace. He lifted her face so that her lips rested close to his own, as he said gently:
"How great must be the strength of love when innocence does not turn away appalled at guilt. Darling, suppose I should tell you that I do not fear the coming of these men? Suppose I should tell you that I do not fear the investigation of all the world, because I am innocent of the crime with which I have been charged—because I was not even by when Olney was pushed into the Donato Mine?"
She staggered back from him, her face growing whiter, more sunken than it had been before. She did not touch him then, but as he would have taken her again in his arms, motioned him back, passing her hands across her eyes to clear her vision.
"I thought to spare you and—and him," Leith cried swiftly, hurrying through the tale, because he saw how she was suffering; "but I have realized now that nothing under heaven will justify a lie. That was my sin, Carlita; but nothing beyond that, I swear to you. Half an hour ago I would have scorned to justify myself in your eyes, but such love as yours does not come into the lives of many men. Listen, darling. Even in those old days when you scorned me, I loved you so well that I wished to spare you any pain that it lay in my power to save you from. I knew your pure white innocence and the suffering it would entail upon you to discover that the lover you had chosen in preference to me was not the man you had pictured him. Carlita, a woman's idea of a man—particularly a young girl's brought up in the untarnished school you were—and a man's idea of a man are not the same. You demand purity of him as he demands it of you, and while Olney was my friend—while I loved him like a brother—I wished to save you from a knowledge of—his past. Two years ago, when Olney was in Mexico he met a girl with whom he thought he fell in love. She was a hot-blooded Mexican, who loved him in return, but with a sort of savage ferocity. She was the daughter of Manuel Meriaz. When Olney left Mexico there was some kind of an understanding between them—a relationship with which I would not offend your pure ears. But Olney forgot her in a short time. When he went back to Mexico, I believe he had ceased to remember her very existence; but she had not forgotten him. She and her father were at the mines. She reminded Olney of his old promise to marry her. She even pleaded with him to keep his word. She loved him fondly, and—well Carlita, he should have made good his broken troth, because there was a—a little infant in Mexico—a tiny dead child, upon whose tomb there was no name."
"Great God!"
"Olney could not be brought to see the justice in her claim, because he loved you, and one day, after a violent scene, in which she besought him to make good the old promise, for their dead baby's sake, there, under the desolation of the forsaken mine, where she had summoned him for a rendezvous, she pushed him to his death. I swear to you that I do not believe she meant to kill him, and so, in pity for her blighted life, I tried to save her from the punishment of her crime—to save him from the shame of public infamy, and you from the bitter knowledge of it all. Manuel Meriaz knew this story. He cared little enough, Heaven knows, for the disgrace of the poor girl, so long as he could gain money through it, and so I bought his silence, which he had discovered was of value to me because of my affection for Olney and my love for you. Carlita, before God, this is all the truth!"