"My dear, I have painful news for you...."
"With Gordon?" The question was almost a sob. "Who, father? Dorothy Purnell?"
Helen dropped into a chair, and going to her, the Senator placed his hands on her shoulders. She looked shrunken, years older, with the bloom of youth blighted as frost strikes a flower, but even in the first and worst moments of her grief there was dignity in it. In a measure Race Moran had prepared her for the blow; he, and what she herself had seen of the partisanship between Dorothy and Gordon.
"You must be brave, my dear," her father soothed, "because it is necessary that you should know. Race came upon them here last night, in each other's embrace, I believe, and with the girl's help, Wade got the upper hand."
"Are you sure it was Gordon?" Her cold fingers held to his warm ones as in her childhood days, when she had run to him for protection.
"His quirt is there on the desk."
"But why should they have come here, father—here of all places? Doesn't that seem very improbable to you? That is what I can't understand. Why didn't he go to her house?"
"For fear of arrest, I suppose. Their reason for coming here, you have half expressed, Helen, because it offered them the safest refuge, at that time of night, in Crawling Water. The office has not been used at night since we rented it, and besides Moran has been doubly busy with me at the hotel. But I don't say that was their sole reason for coming here. The safe had been opened, and doubtless their chief motive was robbery."
She sprang to her feet and stood facing him with flaming cheeks, grieved still but aroused to passionate indignation.
"Father, do you stand there and tell me that Gordon Wade has not only been untrue to me, but that he came here at night to steal from you; broke in here like a common thief?" Her breast heaved violently, and in her eyes shone a veritable fury of scorn.