disappearance of the captain. He read to her the letter he had received
from him, and told her of his hopeless chase to the docks only to find
him gone. She listened to him breathlessly, with varying color, with
an occasional outburst of pity, or a strange shining of the eyes, that
sometimes became clouded and misty, and at the conclusion with a calm
and grave paleness.
"But," she said, "you should have told me all."
"It was not my secret," he pleaded.
"You should have trusted me."
"But the captain had trusted ME."
She looked at him with grave wonder, and then said with her old
directness: "But if I had been told such a secret affecting you, I
should have told you." She stopped suddenly, seeing his eyes fixed on
her, and dropped her own lids with a slight color. "I mean," she said
hesitatingly, "of course you have acted nobly, generously, kindly,
wisely--but I hate secrets! Oh, why cannot one be always frank?"
A wild idea seized Randolph. "But I have another secret--you have not
guessed--and I have not dared to tell you. Do you wish me to be frank
now?"
"Why not?" she said simply, but she did not look up.
Then he told her! But, strangest of all, in spite of his fears and
convictions, it flowed easily and naturally as a part of his other
secret, with an eloquence he had not dreamed of before. But when he told
her of his late position and his prospects, she raised her eyes to his
for the first time, yet without withdrawing her hand from his, and said
reproachfully,--
"Yet but for THAT you would never have told me."
"How could I?" he returned eagerly. "For but for THAT how could I help
you to carry out YOUR trust? How could I devote myself to your plans,
and enable you to carry them out without touching a dollar of that
inheritance which you believe to be wrongfully yours?"
Then, with his old boyish enthusiasm, he sketched a glowing picture of
their future: how they would keep the Dornton property intact until the
captain was found and communicated with; and how they would cautiously
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