“You have a right to know, Philip,” she said at length; “don’t imagine it was easy for me to think so; I’ve been suffering pretty acutely this last twenty-four hours. But partly by accident and partly by using my intelligence I have found out several things, and the only conclusion I could come to—a horrid one, but less horrid than some I’ve been fighting against—was that you knew and were trying to screen somebody.” She saw his lips forming into a question and added hurriedly, “Don’t ask me whom, Philip, please. I may be wrong, as I was about you. It isn’t anybody in the house.” “It is difficult to understand,” he said slowly. “What can you have found out to make you conclude such a thing?” She longed to tell him everything; but if he knew nothing—and all her faith in him now was regained—then she was back in her former doubt, and she could not utter a word to bring Celia’s name into such a thing. She might be utterly wrong, she hoped with her whole heart she was. But somebody knew, somebody had opened the shutters and closed them again afterwards. Whatever faith she had in her friends, she could not lay that irrefutable fact aside. “I wish I felt I could tell you,” she said as these thoughts swept over her; “I hate evasions. But if it is not your secret, and I know now it is not, then, well, the less said about it the better, till it’s not guesswork but certainty.” “You are very mysterious,” he said. “Am I?” she answered wearily. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. And I am very worried; it is all so dreadful, I wish I could keep my mind quiet: it will fly round and round and try against my will to solve what it does not understand.” “I didn’t expect you to doubt me, Evelyn,” he said, following out his own thought. “With others it’s different: that ass, Birts, for instance, is eyeing me this morning as if I were a rattlesnake.” “Don’t be angry with me,” she exclaimed; “I believe you absolutely. If I did think you knew, I was sure you were acting from a generous motive in pretending you didn’t. I thought some one must have come in and then there had been a quarrel and an accident, and you wanted to save an unhappy man from consequences he never intended, and you could not tell me because it didn’t involve you alone. That would have been like you, wouldn’t it?” “Well, I don’t know,” he said a little awkwardly; “it doesn’t sound so bad, put that way.” “And that is the way I did put it,” she answered quickly; “I know you. But, Philip, these men don’t, and it is natural, I suppose, that they should think differently. You have told them everything, I suppose?” “They have questioned me to their heart’s content,” he replied. “What I mean is—suppose they decide that you know, even that you helped the other escape, isn’t there some way to prove conclusively that you didn’t?”