Something on the expression of the other man’s face arrested him.
“Why not have a game to pass the time?” he asked solemnly.
“It’s a perfectly good idea, Doc,” smiled Dane with a little shrug of the shoulders. “A pleasant antidote to the hour I have just spent. You know, if I couldn’t have trusted you and Mac I might just as well have shot myself?”
“As bad as that?” said the doctor laconically keeping his eye on Valerie.
“Well, it was for less than this that I was blackballed in Christchurch,” said Dane, with intense bitterness.
“Yes, it is unfortunate that men are often judged not for what they have done, but for what the men who judge them would have done in their place.”
The flashlight cast fantastic shadows on the walls through the frames of the impassive old printing press and the spick and span jobbing machine, and glittered on steel wheels and rods. The bulky cases of type loomed up above them, and the heavy tables and benches added to the weight of the air in the close room. But Dane had been afraid to let the doctor open the doors lest at that hour of the night the light attracting someone should be taken for a fire. He was only too anxious to see Valerie safe in her room in the hotel.
“Wonderful thing, a woman,” said the doctor softly, gazing down at Valerie with profound reverence.
Dane thought of the other man’s wife as he had seen her one day as conspicuous in the middle of River Street as a red barn in the middle of a ploughed field, as blatant as the blaring of a circus troupe, and he marvelled at this inextinguishable charity.
