"Not if I can believe I am making it easy for you."
They walked along, and she said with averted eyes, that he knew had tears in them, "I promise."
"And I promise, too," he said.
She impulsively put out her left hand toward him, and he held its slim fingers in his right a moment, and then let it drop. They both honestly thought they had got the better of that which laughs from its innumerable disguises at all stratagems and all devices to escape it.
"And now," he said, "I want to talk to you about what brought me over here to-day. I thought at first that I was only going to see your lawyer."
XVIII.
Matt felt that he need now no longer practise those reserves in speaking to Sue of her father, which he had observed so painfully hitherto. Neither did she shrink from the fact they had to deal with. In the trust established between them, they spoke of it all openly, and if there was any difference in them concerning it, the difference was in his greater forbearance toward the unhappy man. They both spoke of his wrong-doing as if it were his infirmity; they could not do otherwise; and they both insensibly assumed his irresponsibility in a measure; they dwelt in the fiction or the persuasion of a mental obliquity which would account for otherwise unaccountable things.
"It is what my sister has always said," Sue eagerly assented to his suggestion of this theory. "I suppose it's what I've always believed, too, somehow, or I couldn't have lived."
"Yes; yes, it must be so," Matt insisted. "But now the question is how to reach him, and make some beginning of the end with him. I suppose it's the suspense and the uncertainty that is breaking your sister down?"