“He didn’t speak to you, then, of Mr. Darrow’s letter?”
“He said nothing of any letter.”
“There was one, which was found after poor Darrow’s death. In it he gave Dick leave to use his design for the competition. Dick says the design is wonderful—it would give him just what he needs.”
Miss Verney sat listening raptly, with a rush of colour that suffused her like light.
“But when was this? Where was the letter found? He never said a word of it!” she exclaimed.
“The letter was found on the day of Darrow’s death.”
“But I don’t understand! Why has he never told me? Why should he seem so hopeless?” She turned an ignorant appealing face on Mrs. Peyton. It was prodigious, but it was true—she felt nothing, saw nothing, but the crude fact of the opportunity.
Mrs. Peyton’s voice trembled with the completeness of her triumph. “I suppose his reason for not speaking is that he has scruples.”
“Scruples?”
“He feels that to use the design would be dishonest.”
Miss Verney’s eyes fixed themselves on her in a commiserating stare. “Dishonest? When the poor man wished it himself? When it was his last request? When the letter is there to prove it? Why, the design belongs to your son! No one else had any right to it.”
“But Dick’s right does not extend to passing it off as his own—at least that is his feeling, I believe. If he won the competition he would be winning it on false pretenses.”
“Why should you call them false pretenses? His design might have been better than Darrow’s if he had had time to carry it out. It seems to me that Mr. Darrow must have felt this—must have felt that he owed his friend some compensation for the time he took from him. I can imagine nothing more natural than his wishing to make this return for your son’s sacrifice.”
She positively glowed with the force of her conviction, and Mrs. Peyton, for a strange instant, felt her own resistance wavering. She herself had never considered the question in that light—the light of Darrow’s viewing his gift as a justifiable compensation. But the glimpse she caught of it drove her shuddering behind her retrenchments.
“That argument,” she said coldly, “would naturally be more convincing to Darrow than to my son.”
Miss Verney glanced up, struck by the change in Mrs. Peyton’s voice.
“Ah, then you agree with him? You think it would be dishonest?”
Mrs. Peyton saw that she had slipped into self-betrayal. “My son and I have not spoken of the matter,” she said evasively. She caught the flash of relief in Miss Verney’s face.
“You haven’t spoken? Then how do you know how he feels about it?”
“I only judge from—well, perhaps from his not speaking.”
The girl drew a deep breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That is the very reason that prevents his speaking.”
“The reason?”
“Your knowing what he thinks—and his knowing that you know.”
Mrs. Peyton was startled at her subtlety. “I assure you,” she said, rising, “that I have done nothing to influence him.”
The girl gazed at her musingly. “No,” she said with a faint smile, “nothing except to read his thoughts.” VI
Mrs. Peyton reached home in the state of exhaustion which follows on a physical struggle. It seemed to her as though her talk with Clemence Verney had been an actual combat, a measuring of wrist and eye. For a moment she was frightened at what she had done—she felt as though she had betrayed her son to the
