Kate sighed wearily as her father left the room.  If she could only be as well assured as her strong words implied!  Ah! if she could fetch back her lover by getting at the truth, how willingly she would fly to Rosedale and learn all!  But she dared not question, lest questioning should confirm, where she now at least had the miserable solace of doubt.  Could it be true?  Could Jack be the base schemer her father depicted him?  Then her mind ran back to Rosedale.  She lived again all the enchanting days of that earthly paradise.  She saw Wesley’s furtive starts, his strange disappearances, his growing melancholy, his moody reticence when she questioned him.  Ah! if he had but confided to her!  If she had but dreamed of the desperate purpose born of the loneliness he lived in!  If Jack had been loyal to him, loyal to her, Wesley would have been warned that eager eyes were upon him, ready wits reading his purposes, and revengeful hatred ready to slaughter him.

When the news came that Jack had lost his life in the very enterprise Wesley had contemplated, Kate collapsed under the shock.  Now, when it was too late, she convinced herself that he was innocent.  If she could have recalled him to life, she cried in self-reproach, she would not ask whether he was all her first impulse had painted him.  She had borne up with something like composure when Wesley’s death came upon her; but now, tortured by a sense of responsibility in Jack’s fate, she gave way to the grief she had so long repressed.  If she had not upbraided him, if she had not accused him, in so many words, of murder, he would never have embarked on the mad plot of escape.

She had driven him to his death.  She had sat silent while Acredale rang with calumnies against him.  It was not too late yet to make reparation.  She would proclaim publicly that her brother had rashly courted his own death; that Jack had unknowingly shot him down, as many a man does, in battle, shoot his best friend.  She resolved on the instant to go to the stricken family and make such expiation there as was in her power.  But was there any certainty that the report of Jack’s death was true?  Grievous mistakes of the same sort had been made repeatedly in the public journals.  She was not able to formulate any plan at first.  Her father was more morose than ever.  He seemed in his way to deplore the young man’s death, but not in pity, as she soon learned.  Death had robbed him of a cruelly meditated revenge.  She wisely made no comment when this brutal feeling betrayed itself; but for the first time in her life the girl shuddered at the sight of her father.  The vague rumors of years, that had been whispered about him—­rumors which of old had fired her soul with hot indignation, came back insidiously.  She shuddered.  Was she to lose all—­brother, lover, father—­in this unnatural strife?  She had been so loyal to her father.  She had been so proud of him when others reviled.  She had felt so serenely confident