Then it _was_ Pendleton. I was not mistaken!
"Why do you suppose I engaged myself to you, you poor contemptible weakling! Do you suppose I am in love with you?" Her tears gushed forth, and she rocked her arms passionately. "Love a thing like you? I wanted to keep your weakness and your spinelessness from Uncle Ranny—to save him from the pain he is suffering now because you’re a thief! You promised, promised me over and over you’d keep straight—wouldn’t gamble—wouldn’t drink—over and over—" she wailed with the anguished note that drags on tears—"and this is what you’ve got to! Stealing! And from Uncle Ranny of all people, who’s been father and mother to you—everything in the world! If I didn’t adore him more than anybody on earth; do you think I would have looked at you? Oh, how I wish I could beat you to a pulp!" She lifted her hands on high and for one fascinated instant I actually thought she would.
"I wish I could feel sure of never seeing your face again!" she concluded, collapsing with her own anger.
Slowly, under the blows of her words, the boy lifted his eyes, eyes smoldering with shame, with abject misery, with the hopeless pathos of the weak.
"Then you never cared a damn?" he muttered.
"No—I never cared a damn—in your sense!" she cried, forgetting all restraint in her passionate exasperation. "And I never can and never will now. I’d hoped you’d become a man. But I’m through with you for good!"
I had been standing aside, awed, involuntarily spell-bound with the aloofness and indecision of surprise. I now made a move toward Alicia, to lead her away. "If I didn’t adore him more than anybody on earth." I ought not to have heard that. But I had and my pulses began to throb anew.
A sudden loud rapping at the door, however, startled us all out of our tempest of pain into a common alertness. I glanced at the huddled form of Randolph, at the still quivering figure of Alicia.
"I’ll see who it is!" I muttered, moving toward the hall. Alicia stood for a moment irresolute, and then ran out behind me and disappeared in the darkened dining room.
"What," it flashed through my mind as I unlocked the door, "what if Pendleton was caught—the father of Laura’s children, snatched like the thief he was, in his flight?"