"What about the pearls he sold at Plattsburg?" she asked suddenly.
"I think when the proper time comes, he will tell about that too, Margery." I did not notice my use of her name until too late. If she heard, she failed to resent it. "After all, if you love him, hardly anything else matters, does it? How do we know but that he was in trouble, and that Aunt Jane herself gave them to him?"
She looked at me with a little perplexity.
"You plead his cause very well," she said. "Did he ask you to speak to me?"
"I won't run a race with a man who is lame," I said quietly. "Ethically, I ought to go away and leave you to your dreams, but I am not going to do it. If you love Wardrop as a woman ought to love the man she marries, then marry him and I hope you will be happy. If you don't--no, let me finish. I have made up my mind to clear him if I can: to bring him to you with a clear slate. Then, I know it is audacious, but I am going to come, too, and--I'm going to plead for myself then, unless you send me away."
She sat with her head bent, her color coming and going nervously. Now she looked up at me with what was the ghost of a smile.
"It sounds like a threat," she said in a low voice. "And you--I wonder if you always get what you want?"
Then, of course, Fred came in, and fell over a hassock looking for matches. Edith opened the door of the den and called him to her irritably, but Fred declined to leave the wood fire, and settled down in his easy chair. After a while Edith came over and joined us, but she snubbed Fred the entire evening, to his bewilderment. And when conversation lagged, during the evening that followed, I tried to remember what I had said, and knew I had done very badly. Only one thing cheered me: she had not been angry, and she had understood. Blessed be the woman that understands!
We broke up for the night about eleven. Mrs. Butler had come down for a while, and had even played a little, something of Tschaikovsky's, a singing, plaintive theme that brought sadness back into Margery's face, and made me think, for no reason, of a wet country road and a plodding, back-burdened peasant.
Fred and I sat in the library for a while after the rest had gone, and I told him a little of what I had learned that afternoon.