These had been almost forgotten of late, but she acknowledged, as she thought it over, that her position was practically the same as it had been. She was still exposed to the charge of theft, and although it had been arranged that there should be a compromise, yet in the minds of the two tradesmen who had been victimised and of their assistants she was a thief, and although those who knew her best were convinced of her innocence, a whisper of the affair might yet get abroad, and were the facts known she would be generally condemned. Besides, at any moment the system might be recommenced, she might again be branded as a thief, and the tale of the compromise effected in the first cases would add weight to the charge. It was for this reason that she had broken off her engagement with Lord Halliburn, and had then declared to herself that never would she place herself in a similar position until she was absolutely and entirely cleared from all suspicion, and freed from any chance of a repetition of it.
Nothing had occurred to shake that determination. She had no right to enter upon any engagement until she stood above all suspicion. The man himself might trust her blindly, might scoff at the idea of her doing a dishonourable action, but that would not suffice to shield either him or her from the consequences of the charge. What a life would theirs be were she generally believed to be a thief. Society would close its doors against them. A consciousness of her innocence might support them, but the life would be none the less painful and humiliating. Dorothy arrived at this conclusion not without a certain amount of unacknowledged sense of relief. It obviated the necessity for giving a direct answer to the question that was to be asked her. She felt that she could not again say 'No,' yet she shrank from saying 'Yes'; so when, the next day, Captain Armstrong, happening to find her alone, told her that his love was unchanged since he had spoken to her in the spring, except that he loved her more, and asked if she could not give him a different answer to that with which she had sent him away, she said:
'I am sorry – so sorry, Captain Armstrong. It was a great pain to me to say "No" before, and if I had dreamt when you joined us at Martigny that you still thought of me in that way, I should have told you frankly at once that it were better for us both that you should not stay there; but I thought you had come to regard me as a friend, and it was not until that day on the ice I felt it was not so. It was a great pain to me to say "No" before. I liked you very much then, but, as I told you, not enough for that. I like you even more now; it would be impossible that I could help it when we have been so much together, and you did so much for me that day. I like you so much that if I were free – ' he would have broken in but she checked him by a motion of her hand.
'I am not otherwise than free in that way,' she said; 'I have broken off with Lord Halliburn for good and all, and yet I am not free. Had I been so I do not know what my answer would have been. I don't think I could have brought myself to say "No"; I feel sure I could hardly have said "Yes." I think I must have said, "I do not quite know." I have made one mistake; I must not make another. I like you very much, but I do not think that it is the love that a woman should give to her husband. Give me a little more time to think before I answer you.'
'I should have been well content, Dorothy; I would have waited as long as you liked; but I don't understand how it is that you are not free.'
'You have a right to know. It is because I am disgraced; because as long as this disgrace hangs over me I can never marry.'
'You mean those ridiculous stories that were in the papers, Dorothy. Do you think that I should care for a moment for such things as those, or that they have brought the slightest taint of disgrace upon you in the minds of those that know you?'
'That was the beginning of it,' she said, 'but there was worse; and it was that made me break off my engagement. I doubt now whether in any case I could have held to it. I had begun to feel I had made a mistake before that came, but even had I not done so it would have been the same. I am accused of theft.'
'Of theft, Dorothy!' he repeated in incredulous scorn. 'You suspected of theft!'
'And on evidence so strong,' she went on quietly, 'that even my father for a moment suspected me, and my dear friend, Mr. Singleton, believed that I had been mixed up in some disgraceful transaction; and others, who I thought knew me well, and would have trusted me, as I know you would have done, believed me guilty – not of theft, but of the previous accusations. There are shopmen in London ready to swear in a court of law that I obtained diamonds and other goods from them, and to-morrow fresh charges may be made, and ere long I may stand in the dock as a thief.'
Captain Armstrong looked at her as if he doubted her sanity.
'But no one in his senses could think such a thing, Dorothy.'
'But I have told you that even those who knew me best did, for a moment, think so. Mr. Charles Levine, the lawyer, is a clear-headed man, and yet even he, after hearing all the facts, was convinced of my guilt. I will tell you more – it is fair that I should do so,' and she gave him the history of the postcards, then of the robbery at the jeweller's, of Mr. Singleton lending her the money, of the other robbery on the same day, and of Captain Hampton seeing her in conversation on that afternoon with the man they believed to be the author of the postcards.
'You see,' she said, 'that here is the evidence of three or four tradespeople, all of whom know me well by sight, and who recognised my dress as well as my face. Here is the evidence of Mr. Singleton, who has known me from a child, and that of Captain Hampton, who was at the time seeing me every day; and to all this I have but to oppose my own denial, and to declare that I never was at any of the four places that afternoon.'
'I should believe your word if a thousand swore to the contrary,' he said passionately.
'You may now when you have heard all these things,' she said, 'but you would not at the time. When the shopkeeper and his assistant told my father that story I could see that his face turned white, and that for a moment he believed that I must have taken these things in order to obtain money to bribe the man whom I had solemnly declared had no letters of mine. When I heard the story told, and that my very dress was recognised, I asked myself if I could have done it unconsciously, in a state of somnambulism or something of that sort. I was absolutely dazed and bewildered. With all your trust in me I am sure you must have been shaken when you heard that story, just as my own father was. Again, when my old and kindest friend, Mr. Singleton, declared that I had come to him sobbing and crying, and begging him to save me from disgrace, and that he had given me a cheque for a thousand pounds, could he be blamed for believing that the girl he knew and loved had been engaged in some scandalous affair? As to Captain Hampton, he believed me absolutely in regard to the letters, but he doubted me afterwards. Try to put yourself in his place. If you had known about this affair of the letters, and you had seen me in an out-of-the-way part of London, engaged in a conversation with the man we were searching for as the author of the postcards, what would you have thought?' She asked the question a little wistfully.
'I can't say,' he said honestly. 'I suppose just for a moment I must have thought you had really got into some serious sort of scrape. I don't see how I could have helped it. I am sure I should never have thought you had done anything really wrong.'
'But in that case I should have been a liar.'
'I don't suppose I should have thought of that at the time, Dorothy. When I came to think it all over I should have said it was impossible, and should have doubted my own senses; but the robbery I never could have believed in, if a hundred shopkeepers had sworn to it. But what does it all really mean? There must be some explanation of it all.'
'The only explanation we can arrive at,' she replied, 'is that there is some other woman so like me that she can pass for me when dressed up in clothes like my own.'
'Of course, of course. What a fool I was not to think of that.'
'Yes, Captain Armstrong, you accept it, just as my father and Mr. Singleton accept it, because you and they would accept anything rather than believe