"But you do not believe it, Miss Dorothy?" he questioned.
"You tell me that you are innocent?" she asked, almost in a whisper.
"I am as innocent as you are," he said; and he looked frankly and appealingly into her eyes.
For a moment or two she looked at him in silence, then she said in the same low tone--
"I believe you." And she held out her hand to him, and then turned towards the door.
He had a hundred things to say to her, but somehow the words would not come. He watched her cross the threshold and pass out into the darkness, and he stood still and had not the courage to follow her. It would have been at least a neighbourly thing to see her to the lodge gates, for the night was unillumined by even a star, but his lips refused to move. He stood stock-still, as if riveted to the ground.
How long he remained there staring into the darkness he did not know. Time and place were swallowed up and lost. He was conscious only of the steady approach of an overwhelming calamity. It was gathering from every point of the compass at the same time. It was wrapping him round like a sable pall. It was obliterating one by one every star of hope and promise.
Ruth came to look for him at length, and she uttered a little cry when she saw him, for his face was like the face of the dead.
"Why, Ralph, what is the matter?" And Ruth seized one of his hands and stared eagerly and appealingly into his face.
He shook himself as if he had been asleep, then closed the door quietly and followed her into the living-room.
"Are you not well, Ralph?" Ruth persisted, as she drew up his chair a little nearer the fire. Mrs. Penlogan laid her knitting in her lap, and her eyes echoed Ruth's inquiry.
"I've heard some bad news," he said, speaking with an effort, and he dropped into his chair and stared at the fire.
"Bad news!" both women echoed. "What has happened, Ralph?"
He hesitated for a moment, then he told them the story as Dorothy had told it to him.
"But why should you worry?" Ruth questioned quickly. "You were nowhere near the plantation."
"But how am I to prove it?" he questioned.
"As bad luck would have it, I have not seen a soul."
"That is likely enough. Twenty people in the village looking from behind their curtains may have seen me walk out with a gun under my arm."