CHAPTER XVI.
"A POOR CHAP AS IS ALLUS I' TROUBLE."
"It was nothing but a chance, after all," Murdoch said to Miss Ffrench, just as he had said to Haworth. "It happened that I was the first to see the danger."
She stood opposite to him upon the hearth in her father's house. Neither of them had sat down. She rested her arm upon the low mantel and played with a flower she held in her hand. She looked at the flower as she made the reply.
"You think of it very lightly," she said with rather cold deliberateness. He did not regard her furtively as Haworth had done. Raising her eyes suddenly, after she had said this, she met his, which were fixed upon her.
"No," he answered. "Not lightly at all. It was a horrible thing. I shall never forget it."
She shuddered.
"Nor I," she said.
Then she added, rather in the tone of one reluctantly making a confession:
"I have not slept easily through one night since."
That is very natural," he returned; "but the feeling will wear away."
He would have left her then, but she stopped him with a gesture.
