"I thank you for the advice. What exactly was it that happened to our letters to-night?"
He ascertained that Adam had given his meagre message discreetly. He could now have comforted her easily with half the truth, but he told all briefly--in whose hands was the keeping of the curious fact of the blank letters, and why he judged it comparatively safe.
Bertha pushed the hood from her head, as if she felt suffocated. She sat down upon a fragment of rock on the verge of the hill, and they both gazed at the silent rolling of the cloud beneath.
"Tricks are folly, and deserve detection," she said at length. "Silence is the only noble form of concealment. Yet our friend, who is a lawyer, told us that if we came here obviously as friendless as we are, rumor would have been cruel. It would have worried our reputation as a dog worries a rat. Every face we met would have been full of suspicion, and--surely it is right to shun morbid conditions?"
Durgan stood uneasy. "People often drop almost all correspondence through indolence," he suggested.
"My sister permitted the trick, I think, simply for my sake. She was distressed by your seals and hearing that the letters had come open. I shall be able to tell her it did not happen at the post-office."
"I should have thought your sister would have trusted her fate in God's hands with perfect resignation."
"Yes, I think she does. She has great faith in God."
After another pause, he said: "You were so good as to ask me the other day for advice; will you take an old man's advice now and go home to bed? All things appear more reasonable by daylight, and the more you tire yourself, the more you are likely to see the circumstances of life in distorted shape."
She answered with an anger that leaped beyond her more tardy self-control. "You know no more than my dogs do what I can and cannot do, what it is drives me here to-night, or what it is that I fear."
Penitent in a moment, she said: "You are truly kind, Mr. Durgan. I am so glad that we have a neighbor, and that he should be what you are."
"I wish, since you are in misery, that he could have been one in whom you could confide, who could perhaps help."
She stood wrapping her cloak closer about her. "Let me be petulant when I want to be petulant, mysterious when I must, tragic when I must, gay when I can. Let my moods pass you as the winds pass. If you can do this and preserve a secret, you will do more than any other human being could or would." She waited a moment, and added: "I have trusted you from the first to do this; I do not know why."