“Mr. Mortimer could not steal—it is impossible.”
“Have you sufficient grounds for your faith—do you happen to know who took the money, for it was stolen?”
The girl did not answer at once. At first her stand had simply been one of implicit faith in the man she had conjured into a hero of all that was good and noble. She had not cast about for extenuating evidence; she had not asked herself who the guilty man was; her faith told her it was morally impossible for Mortimer to become a thief. Now Crane's questions, more material than the first deadening effects of Alan's accusation, started her mind on a train of thought dealing with motive possibilities.
She knitted her small brows, and tapping the jogging horse's quarter with the whip sat for many minutes silently absorbed.
Her companion waited for an answer with his usual well-bred patience. Perhaps the girl had not heard him. Perhaps she did not wish to answer a question so unanswerable. He waited.
Mortimer, being innocent, replaced the stolen money, Allis's mind tabulated—she tickled this thought off on the horse with her whip—it was to shield some one. Her heart told her, his eyes had told her, that he would have taken upon himself this great risk but for one person, her brother. Yes, Mortimer was a hero! The horse, lazily going, jumped a little in the traces; she had struck him a harder tap with the whip. Allis continued her mental summing up. Why did Mortimer go to Gravesend? It must have been to see Alan—the boy was there. If he had discovered that the money was missing, and thought Alan had taken it, he would do this; if he had suspected some other person he would have made the matter known to the cashier. He did not replace the money at once, because he hadn't it. She knew that Mortimer was poor. He had failed to find Alan until after Lauzanne's victory; her brother had told her this much, and that Mortimer had won a lot of money over the horse. Why he had bet on Lauzanne she knew not; perhaps Providence had guided, had helped him that much. But surely that was the money, his winnings, with which he had replaced the thousand dollars.
The girl's mind had worked methodically, following sequence of action to sequence, until finally the conviction that Mortimer had sought to shield her brother, and chance or Providence working through herself and Lauzanne had placed in his hands the necessary funds, came to her as fixedly as though the whole past panorama of events lay pictured before her eyes.
She saw all this mentally; but would it avail anything in actuality? If the boy disclaimed guilt, as he had; if Mortimer limited his defense to a simple denial, refusing to implicate her brother, what could she do except give her moral support? To her it seemed such a small reward for his heroism; her faith would not save him from the brand of felony, and to follow out her convictions publicly she must denounce her brother, cast upon him the odium of theft. Truly her position was one of extreme hopelessness. Two men she loved stood before her mentally, one accused of others as a thief, and one—her own brother—charged by her reason with the crime.
Under the continued silence Crane grew restless; the girl, almost oblivious of his presence, deep in the intricacies of the crime, gave no sign of a desire to pursue the discussion.
“Of course I am anxious to clear the young man if he is innocent,” hazarded the banker, to draw her gently back into the influence that he felt must be of profit to himself. This assertion of Crane's was only assimilatively truthful. As president of the bank, naturally he should wish to punish none other than the guilty man; as a rival to Mortimer for the girl's affection, he could not but be pleased to see the younger man removed from his path, and in a way which would forever preclude his aspiring to Allis's hand. Believe in Mortimer as she might, he felt sure that she would not run counter to the inevitable wishes of her mother and marry a man who stood publicly branded as a thief.