Sally was somber, bloomy, thoughtful. "You weren't driven to kill George?" she asked.
"How do you mean?"
"By that awful instinct, that hankering to kill, you once told me these gunmen had."
"No, I can swear it wasn't that. I didn't want to kill him. But he forced me. As I had to go after these two men it was a foregone conclusion about Wright. It was premeditated. I have no excuse."
"Hush—Tell me, if you confronted them, drew on them, then you had a chance to kill my uncle?"
"Yes. I could have done it easily."
"Why, then, didn't you?"
"It was for Diane's sake. I'm afraid I didn't think of you. I had put you out of my mind."
"Well, if a man can be noble at the same time he's terrible, you've been, Russ—I don't know how I feel. I'm sick and I can't think. I see, though, what you saved Diane and Steele. Why, she's touching happiness again, fearfully, yet really. Think of that! God only knows what you did for Steele. If I judged it by his suffering as you lay there about to die it would be beyond words to tell. But, Russ, you're pale and shaky now. Hush! No more talk!"
With all my eyes and mind and heart and soul I watched to see if she shrank from me. She was passive, yet tender as she smoothed my pillow and moved my head. A dark abstraction hung over her, and it was so strange, so foreign to her nature. No sensitiveness on earth could have equaled mine at that moment. And I saw and felt and knew that she did not shrink from me. Thought and feeling escaped me for a while. I dozed. The old shadows floated to and fro.