“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just _for_ that: to get her
away. Far from this,” she pursued, “far from _them_—”
“She may be different? She may be free?” I seized her almost with joy.
“Then, in spite of yesterday, you _believe_—”
“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in the light
of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole
thing as she had never done. “I believe.”
Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been in
my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my
honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave
of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. “There’s one
thing, of course—it occurs to me—to remember. My letter, giving the
alarm, will have reached town before you.”
I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and
how weary at last it had made her. “Your letter won’t have got there.
Your letter never went.”
“What then became of it?”
“Goodness knows! Master Miles—”
“Do you mean _he_ took it?” I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. “I mean that I saw
yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn’t where you
had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and
he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it.” We could only
exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated “You see!”
“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it.”
“And don’t you see anything else?”
I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine.”
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
it. “I make out now what he must have done at school.” And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “He stole!”