He nodded.
"Yes," said he. "I tried to help a suffering, outcast woman--or one who
posed as such. And she betrayed me to my enemies. And so--"
"There _was_ a woman in this affair, then?" Catherine queried with
sudden pain. "The newspapers haven't made the story _all_ up out of
whole cloth?"
"No. There _was_ a woman. A Delilah, who delivered me into the hands of
the Philistines, when I tried to help her in what she lied in telling me
was her need. Will you hear the story?"
Still very pale, she formed a half-inarticulate "Yes!" with her full
lips. Then, seeming to brace herself by a tighter clasp on the hard
steel grating, she listened while he spoke.
Earnestly, honestly and with perfect straightforwardness, omitting
nothing, adding nothing, he gave her the narrative of that fatal night's
events, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the
wonderfully-disguised woman, till her cudgel-blow had laid him senseless
on the floor.
He told her the part that every actor therein had played; how the whole
drama had been staged, to dishonor and convict him, to railroad him to
the Pen for a long term, perhaps to kill him.
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