“Can’t tell me?” wailed St. John. “Well, I call that pretty rough!”
“It is rough,” Hewson admitted; “and Heaven knows that I would make it smooth if I could. I never once--except once only--mentioned your place in connection with the matter. I was scrupulously careful not to do so, for I did imagine something like what has happened. I would do anything--anything--in reparation. But I can’t even tell you how the name of your place got out in the connection, though certainly you have a right to ask and to know. The circumstances were--peculiar. The person-- was one that I wouldn’t have dreamt was capable of repeating it. It was as if I had said the words over to myself.”
“Well, I can’t understand all that,” said St. John, with rueful sulkiness, from which he brisked up to ask, as if by a sudden inspiration, “If it was only to one person, why couldn’t you deny it, and throw the onus on the other fellow?” He looked up at Hewson, standing nerveless before him, from where he lay mournfully wallowing in an easy-chair, as if now for the first time, there might be a gleam of hope for them both in some such notion.
Hewson slowly shook his head. “It wouldn’t work. The person--isn’t that kind of person.”
“Why, but see here,” St. John urged. “There must be something in the fellow that you can appeal to. If you went and told him how it was playing the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the necessity of letting you deny it, and taking the consequences, if he was anything of a man at all.”
“He isn’t anything of a man at all,” said Hewson, in mechanical and melancholy parody.
“Then in Heaven’s name what is he?” demanded St. John, savagely.
“A woman.” “Oh!” St. John fell back in his chair. But he pulled himself up again with a sudden renewal of hope. “Why, see here! If she’s the right kind of woman, she’ll enjoy denying the story, and putting the people in the wrong that have circulated it!”
Hewson shook his head in rejection of the general principle, while, as to the particular instance, he could only say: “She isn’t that kind. She’s the kind that would rather die herself, and let everybody else die, than be party to any sort of deception.”
“She must be a queer woman,” St. John bewailed himself, looking at the point of his cigar, and discovering to his surprise that it was out. He did not attempt to light it. “Of course, I can’t ask you _who_ she is; but why shouldn’t I see her, and try what _I_ can do with her? I’m the one that’s the principal sufferer in this matter,” he added, perhaps seeing refusal in Hewson’s troubled eye.