"That little teacher of the Indian school was with him," enlarged her father gravely. "He is shielding her or she, him. There is something between those two."
Billie Boland swooned into her father's arms.
"Henry? I—I could never have believed that of him!" she shuddered as she came to; and that was all she did say then. She allowed herself to be led away quite humbly by her maid; but once alone: "And so that explains it," she sobbed, beating her pillow. "They are shielding each other, are they? There's something between them, is there? And she came to me to plead for him! The little two-faced hypocrite!"
But the pity of it was—the shame of it, she told herself, when her weepings were over—that she still loved him. Yet now she would never go to him—never; pride would see to that. She wept afresh because she had been robbed of the sweet privilege of flying to her lover in the hour when the situation of both had become extreme.
She was impelled to write him one hot and scathing line but did not. Her treatment of him continued to be—silence, the coldest, cruelest blow that love can strike at love—an icy dagger pointed at the heart. Hour by hour that dagger entered, chilling and killing. Excuse-inventing could not stand up against it. At last it seemed that it had done its work. But that was not until the fifth day; and on the fifth day Lahleet came, but even then not to see Henry—to stand before Adam John's cell, with the two gutturaling at each other in that strange jargon of theirs—she sympathetically at times, encouragingly cross-examining, apparently; he stolidly, despondently.
