She fell silent, her eyes shining luminously under half closed lids.  She seemed unconscious of his gaze riveted upon her face.  It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside by her painful effort.  He was seeing her clearly now and without cloud of passion—­in all her innocence, her sadness, set sacredly apart from other women by the long devotion of her thwarted youth.  An immense compassion took possession of him.  He could have fallen at her feet praying her forgiveness for his mean suspicions, his harsh judgment.

The sound of hammers on the veranda roof above their heads appeared to rouse her.

“Don’t you think I ought to tell—­everybody?” she asked hurriedly.

He considered her question in silence for a moment.  The bitterness against Andrew Bolton had grown and strengthened with the years into something rigid, inexorable.  Since early boyhood he had grown accustomed to the harsh, unrelenting criticisms, the brutal epithets applied to this man who had been trusted with money and had defaulted.  Even children, born long after the failure, reviled the name of the man who had made their hard lot harder.  It had been the juvenile custom to throw stones at the house he had lived in.  He remembered with fresh shame the impish glee with which, in company with other boys of his own age, he had trampled the few surviving flowers and broken down the shrubs in the garden.  The hatred of Bolton, like some malignant growth, had waxed monstrous from what it preyed upon, ruining and distorting the simple kindly life of the village.  She was waiting for his answer.

“It would seem so much more honest,” she said in a tired voice.  “Now they can only think me eccentric, foolishly extravagant, lavishly generous—­when I am trying—­ I didn’t dare to ask Deacon Whittle or Judge Fulsom for a list of the creditors, so I paid a large sum—­far more than they would have asked—­for the house.  And since then I have bought the old bank building.  I should like to make a library there.”

“Yes, I know,” he said huskily.

“Then the furniture—­I shall pay a great deal for that.  I want the house to look just as it used to, when father comes home.  You see he had an additional sentence for trying to escape and for conspiracy; and since then his mind—­he doesn’t seem to remember everything.  Sometimes he calls me Margaret.  He thinks I am—­mother.”

Her voice faltered a little.

“You mustn’t tell them,” he said vehemently.  “You mustn’t!”

He saw with terrible clearness what it would be like:  the home-coming of the half-imbecile criminal, and the staring eyes, the pointing fingers of all Brookville leveled at him.  She would be overborne by the shame of it all—­trampled like a flower in the mire.

She seemed faintly disappointed.

“But I would far rather tell,” she persisted.  “I have had so much to conceal—­all my life!”

She flung out her hands in a gesture of utter weariness.