"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.
I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"
"I've burned it."
"Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"
Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"
"Did you take letters?--or other things?"
"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far
off and that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety.
Yet it did reach him. "Did I STEAL?"
I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were
more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it
with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world.
"Was it for that you mightn't go back?"
The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise.
"Did you know I mightn't go back?"
"I know everything."
He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"
"Everything. Therefore DID you--?" But I couldn't say it again.
Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."
My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--
but it was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why,
if it was all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment.
"What then did you do?"
He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath,
two or three times over, as if with difficulty.
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