The first thing I did was to hunt up Miss Graham.
She met me with eagerness; an eagerness I found it difficult to dispel with my disappointing news in regard to Doctor Pool.
"He is not the man," said I. "Can you think of any other?"
She shook her head, her large gray eyes showing astonishment and what I felt bound to regard as an honest bewilderment.
"I know of no other person capable of wronging that child."
"You are probably right. But there is a gentleman--one interested in the family--a man with something to gain--"
"Mr. Rathbone? You must not mention him in any such connection. He is one of the best men I know--kind, good, and oh, so sensitive! A dozen fortunes wouldn't tempt a man of his stamp to do any one living a wrong, let alone a little innocent child."
"I know; but there are other temptations greater than money to some men; infinitely greater to one as sensitive as you say he is. What if he loved a woman! What if his only hope of winning her--"
"You must not think that of him," she again interposed. "Nothing could make a villain of _him_. I have seen him too many times in circumstances which show a man's character. He is good through and through, and in all that concerns Gwendolen, honorable to the core. I once saw him save her life at the risk of his own."
She did. They were convincing. As I listened, the phantasm of the night before assumed fainter and fainter proportions. When she had finished I warmly remarked that I was glad to hear the story of so heroic an act.
And I was. Not that I ascribed too deep a significance to the word which had escaped Mr. Rathbone on the dock, but because I was glad to have my instinctive confidence in the man verified by facts.
"Ellie," said I (it seemed both natural and proper to call her by that name now), "what explanation would you give if, under any circumstances (all circumstances are possible, you know), you heard this gentleman speak of feeling guilty in connection with Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?"
"I should have to know the circumstances," was her quiet answer.
"Let me imagine some. Say that it was night, late night, at an hour when the most hardened amongst us are in a peculiarly responsive condition; say that he had been, spending hours near the house of the woman he had long loved but had quite despaired of winning in his greatly hampered condition, and with the fever of this longing upon him, but restrained by emotions the nature of which we can not surmise, had now found his way down to the river--to the spot where boats have clustered and men crouched in the gruesome and unavailing search we know of; say that he hung there long over the water, gazing down in silence, in solitude, alone, as he thought, with his own conscience and the suggestions offered by that running stream where some still think, despite facts, despite all the probabilities, that Gwendolen has found rest, and when his heart was full, should be seen to strike his breast and utter, with a quick turn of his face up the hill, this one word, 'Guilty'?"