A
poor return I have made for that, truly!"
Grace looked up in his face gasping.
"Oh, say that! say that again. Oh, good Lord, merciful Lord, at last!
Oh, if you knew what it was to have even one weight lifted off, among
all my heavy burdens, and that weight the hardest to bear. God forgive
me that it should have been so! Oh, I can breathe freely now again,
that I know I am not suspected by you."
"By you?" Tom could not but see what, after all, no human being can
conceal, that Grace cared for him. And the devil came and tempted
him once more: but this time it was in vain. Tom's better angel had
returned; Grace's tender guilelessness, which would with too many men
only have marked her out as the easier prey, was to him as a sacred
shield before her innocence. So noble, so enthusiastic, so pure! He
could not play the villain with that woman.
But there was plainly a mystery. What were the burdens, heavier even
than unjust suspicion, of which she had spoken? There was no harm in
asking.
"But, Grace--Miss Harvey--You will not be angry with me if I ask?--Why
speak so often, as if finding this money depended on you alone? You
wish me to recover it, I know; and if you can counsel me, why not do
so? Why not tell me whom you suspect?"
Her old wild terror returned in an instant. She stopped short--
"Suspect? I suspect? Oh, I have suspected too many already! Suspected
till I began to hate my fellow-creatures--hate life itself, when I
fancied that I saw 'thief' written on every forehead.
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