She saw it, but did not pause. Pushing up the window, she stepped into the room; then, as he did not offer to help her, turned and shut the window behind her and carefully arranged the curtains. He meantime stood watching her with eyes in whose fierce light burned equal love and equal anger.
When all was completed, she faced him. Instantly a cry broke from his lips:
“You here!” he exclaimed, as if her presence were more than he could meet or stand. But in another moment the forlornness of her position seemed to strike him, and he advanced toward her, saying in a voice husky with passion: “Wretched woman, what have you done? Was it not enough that for weeks, months now, you have played with my love and misery as with toys, that you should rise up at the last minute and crush me before the whole world with a story, mad as it is false, of yourself being a criminal and the destroyer of the woman for whose death your miserable lover is being tried? Had you no consideration, no pity, if not for yourself, ruined by this day’s work, for me, who have sacrificed everything, done everything the most devoted man or lawyer could do to save this fellow and win you for my wife?”
“Sir,” said she, meeting the burning anger of his look with the coldness of a set despair, as if in the doubt awakened by his changed demeanor she sought to probe his mind for its hidden secret, “I did what any other woman would have done in my place. When we are pushed to the wall we tell the truth.”
“The truth!” Was that his laugh that rang startlingly through the room? “The truth! You told the truth! Imogene, Imogene, is any such farce necessary with me?”
Her lips, which had opened, closed again, and she did not answer for a moment; then she asked:
“How do you know that what I said was not the truth?”
“How do I know?” He paused as if to get his breath. “How do I know?” he repeated, calling up all his self-control to sustain her gaze unmoved. “Do you think I have lost my reason, Imogene, that you put me such a question as that? How do I know you are innocent? Recall your own words and acts since the day we met at Mrs. Clemmens’ house, and tell me how it would be possible for me to think anything else of you?”
But her purpose did not relax, neither did she falter as she returned:
“Mr. Orcutt, will you tell me what has ever been said by me or what you have ever known me to do that would make it certain I did not commit this crime myself?”
His indignation was too much for his courtesy.
“Imogene,” he commanded, “be silent! I will not listen to any further arguments of this sort. Isn’t it enough that you have destroyed my happiness, that you should seek to sport with my good-sense? I say you are innocent as a babe unborn, not only of the crime itself but of any complicity in it. Every word you have spoken, every action you have taken, since the day of Mrs. Clemmens’ death, proves you to be the victim of a fixed conviction totally at war with the statement you were pleased to make today. Only your belief in the guilt of another and your—your—”
He stopped, choked. The thought of his rival maddened him.
She immediately seized the opportunity to say:
“Mr. Orcutt, I cannot argue about what I have done. It is over and cannot be remedied. It is true I have destroyed myself, but this is no time to think of that. All I can think of or mourn over now is that, by destroying myself, I have not succeeded in saving Craik Mansell.”
If her purpose was to probe the lawyer’s soul for the deadly wound that had turned all his sympathies to gall, she was successful at last. Turning upon her with a look in which despair and anger were strangely mingled, he cried:
“And me, Imogene—have you no thought for me?”
“Sir,” said she, “any thought from one disgraced as I am now, would be an insult to one of your character and position.”
It was true. In the eyes of the world Tremont Orcutt and Imogene Dare henceforth stood as far apart as the poles. Realizing it only too well, he uttered a half-inarticulate exclamation, and trod restlessly to the other end of the room. When he came back, it was with more of the lawyer’s aspect and less of the baffled lover’s.
“Imogene,” he said, “what could have induced you to resort to an expedient so dreadful? Had you lost confidence in me? Had I not told you I would save this man from his threatened fate?”
“You cannot do everything,” she replied. “There are limits even to a power like yours. I knew that Craik was lost if I gave to the court the testimony which Mr. Ferris expected from me.”
“Ah, then,” he cried, seizing with his usual quickness at the admission which had thus unconsciously, perhaps, slipped from her, “you acknowledge you uttered a perjury to save yourself from making declarations you believed to be hurtful to the prisoner?”
A faint smile crossed her lips, and her whole aspect suddenly changed.
“Yes,” she said; “I have no motive for hiding it from you now. I perjured myself to escape destroying Craik Mansell. I was scarcely the mistress of my own actions. I had suffered so much I was ready to do anything to save the man I had so relentlessly pushed to his doom. I forgot that God does not prosper a lie.”
The jealous gleam which answered her from the lawyer’s eyes was a revelation.
“You regret, then,” he said, “that you tossed my happiness away with a breath of your perjured lips?”
“I regret I did not tell the truth and trust God.”
At this
