The perspiration stood afresh on his brow as he made the confession.
“I thought he was dead,” said Ilam, speaking quickly. “I thought I should be accused of his murder. And so I--the fact is, I was mad. I was off my head. I must have been. Until yesterday I actually fancied I was being haunted by his ghost. Yes! me! me--thinking a thing like that! But I did; and yesterday I was in that big crush, during the shower, in the Court of the Exposition Palace, and he, too, was in the crowd. I saw him; I touched him; he didn’t see me, thank Heaven! Then I knew that what I had buried was not a corpse.”
“Who is this man?” asked Juliette calmly.
“My angel!” said Ilam, driven to poetry by the stress of his emotion, “you mustn’t inquire; there are some things I can’t tell you--at least, not yet. When we are married, when matters are settled a bit, I will tell you everything, but not now.”
“Look here,” he said, “if you persist I shall simply go and kill myself.”
“My friend,” she resumed, “you do not love me as much as I love you. The measure of love is trust, and you do not trust me completely.”
“I love you in my way,” said Ilam doggedly; “men are not like women.”
“That is true,” she admitted philosophically.
“I would tell you everything if I was free to do so,” he said.
“Dearest”--she addressed him in quite a new tone--“you know something about those attacks on Carlos’ life.”
She spoke with an air of absolute certainty.
“I have had nothing to do with them,” he said.
“I can tell from your manner,” she said triumphantly.
“I know nothing for certain, nothing precise,” said Ilam--“nothing that I can tell you--nothing that I dare tell you.”
“Dearest,” she remarked, with a faint acidity, “it seems to me that you have come here to-day in order not to tell me things.”
He deprecated her tone with an appealing gesture.
“I can tell you, at any rate, this,” he said, “that your brother’s life is no longer in danger--of that I am sure.”
“Which is more than can be said of my life,” Ilam proceeded, not heeding her smile.
“Your life is in danger?” she questioned, rushing to him as though she would protect him.
Ilam, without a word, led her to the window, from the corner of which a glimpse of the avenue could be caught, and walking to and fro there in the avenue was the Soudanese.