“But . . .” she began, wondering.

“There are no buts about it.  Suppose I can get him convicted, which I doubt; he’d get a light sentence, would appeal, at most would be out of the way a couple of years or so.  And then it would all be to do over again.  No; I want him out in the open, where he can go as far as he wants to go.  And then . . .”

She saw how his body stiffened as he braced himself with his feet against the foot-board.

“We won’t talk shop,” she said gently.  “It isn’t good for you.  Don’t think about such things any more than you have to.”

“I’ve got to think about something,” he said impatiently.  “Can I think about you?”

“Why not?” she answered as lightly as she had spoken before.

“Maybe that isn’t good for me either,” he answered.

“Nonsense.  It’s always good for us to think about our friends.”

His eyes wandered from hers, rested a moment upon the little table near his bedhead and came back to her, narrowing a little.

“Will you set a chair against that window-shade?” he asked.  “The light at the side hurts my eyes.”

It was a natural request and she turned naturally to do what he asked.  But, even with her back turned, she knew that he had reached out swiftly for something that lay on the table, that he had thrust it out of sight under his pillow.

Mrs. Engle returned and Virginia, staying another minute, said good-by.  As she went out she glanced down at the table.  In her room she asked herself what it was that he had snatched and hidden.  It seemed a strange thing to do and the question perplexed her; while she attached no importance to it, it was there like a pebble in one’s shoe, refusing to be ignored.

That night, just as she was going to sleep, she knew.  Out of a half doze she had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a withering rose, a scrap of note-paper, a fountain pen.  The pen . . . it was Patten’s . . . had evidently leaked and had been wiped carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half wrapped around it.  She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in Patten’s slovenly hand.  And she knew that it had been removed while she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped the pen with it under the pillow.

She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter another thought.  But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.

CHAPTER XIV

A FREE MAN

“I am a free man, if you please.”  The sheriff stood in the hotel doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda chair.  “I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away.  May I watch you while you read?”

Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of welcome.  He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt and haggard.