“You couldn’t understand—you couldn’t believe the real facts even if I told you,” was her reply. “Besides, this refusal of the woman Lejeune prevents me knowing the real truth myself. She intends that I shall suffer—that I shall pay the penalty of the crime of another. She vowed revenge and, alas!” she sighed, “she has it now.”
“But she’s quite a common person,” I remarked, for knowing the Continent as I did, and being some thing of a cosmopolitan, I put her down as of the lower class.
“It is her foreign ill-breeding that renders her such a bitter enemy. She has no pity and no remorse—indeed what Frenchwoman has?”
“Then I was a fool to let her escape! Had I known, I would have given the pair into the detective’s hands and faced the worst.”
“And by so doing you would have caused my death!” was her low remark in a hard strained voice. We had climbed the hill and arrived at the edge of Geddington Chase, where we halted at the old weather-worn stile which gave entrance to the wood.
“Yet by allowing them to escape it seems that I have unwittingly been their accessory!” I remarked. “You do not anticipate that this woman Lejeune will reveal the truth and thus place you in a position of safety. Therefore, why should we shield her?”
“I feel sure she will not—now that she is friendly with Joseph Logan.”
“You mean the man who was with you at early morning?”
She nodded in the affirmative, and with a sigh declared: “The interests of the pair are entirely identical. Even if she wished to reveal what she knew, he would prevent her. I never anticipated that they would become acquainted and thus unite their evil intentions against myself!”
“Against you?” I cried. “Why?”