“He is not worthy of you—” Bransby was commanding himself—at what cost only he knew—and Horace Latham might partly have guessed.
After a pause—painful to him—she was too indignant to suffer much now—at last she spoke—sternly. “Why do you say that?”
“Don’t press the question,” he pleaded, “you know how much I care for you—how dear you are to me. Surely you must know that I would not come between you and your happiness if I hadn’t a good reason.”
Pity for his evident distress welled over her, and she answered him tenderly: “I can’t, dear.”
She waited. He waited too. He could count his heart thump, and almost she might have counted it too.
At last he nerved himself desperately, went to his desk and pulled the ledger from the drawer. He put it down ready to his hand, if he had to show it to her at last; then turned and laid his hands on her shoulders.
When he could command himself—it was not at once—he said, speaking more gently than in all his long, gentle loving of her he had ever spoken to her before, “Helen, Hugh is a thief.”
There was silence between them; a silence neither could ever forget. It punctuated their mutual life.
She broke it. For a while she stood rigid and dazed—and then she laughed.
No lash in his face—even from her hand—could have hurt him so.
Again she waited: haughty and outraged now.
“He has stolen ten thousand pounds from me.”
“That is why Grant came here last night—to tell me.”
The girl made a gesture of infinite scorn, of unspeakable rebuke.
“My dear, I would have spared you this—if I could.”
She answered him then, contempt in her voice, no faintest shadow of fear in her brave young eyes. “I don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t believe it—at first. But the proof,”—he went to the desk and laid one hand sorrowfully on the big buff book—“well, it’s too strong to be denied. You shall see it yourself.”
“I will not look. I would not believe it if Hugh told me himself.” She turned quietly and left him, and he dared not stay her.
But he heard her sob as she passed along the hall.
At the sound his white face quivered and he crouched down in a chair and laid his tired face on the table. He sat so for a long time—perfectly still. Presently a wet bead of something salt lay in the heart of the rose lotus flower.