You understand that?"
She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His
eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
"But it was neither one nor the other," he went on. "Then, why I your
emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me."
She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of
her wonder could be read.
"I said I couldn't," she whispered.
"But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!" the playfulness
of tone hardly concealed his irritation. "What power there must be in
words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not listen with particular
care, did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them
into that idiot's mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to
remember, they would perhaps convince me, too."
"I didn't listen," she protested. "What was it to me what they said of
anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to
look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got
thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die."
Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these
quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased
abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick
at heart.
"Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--company?
You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it made me unhappy
suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you.
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