n who had made him his slave!

The thing fascinated him, as was natural; and, pacing his cell,
stopping between mouthfuls of his food as he sat at the jail table,
sitting up in his cot in the middle of the night to think, Jeffrey
caught at every scrap of theory and every thread of fact that would
fit into the story as it must have happened. He wandered into many
blind trails of theory and explanation, but, strange as it was, he at
last came upon the truth--and stuck to it.

Gadbeau had killed Rogers. Gadbeau had been caught in the fire and had
almost burned to death. He had managed to reach the place where Ruth
and the Bishop had found refuge. He had died there in their presence.
He had confessed. The Catholics always told the truth when they were
going to die. Ruth and the Bishop had heard him. Ruth _knew_. The
Bishop _knew_.

When Ruth came again, he watched her closely; and saw--just what he
had expected to see. Ruth _knew_. It was not only her love and her
confidence in him. She had none of the little whispering, torturing
doubts that must sometimes, unbidden, rise to frighten even his
mother. Ruth _knew_.

That she should not tell him, or give him any outward hint of what
she was hiding in her mind, did not surprise him. It was a very
serious matter this with Catholics. It was a sacred matter with
anybody, to carry the secret of a dead man. Ruth would not speak
unnecessarily of it. When the proper time came, and there was need,
she would speak. For the present--Ruth _knew_. That was enough.

When the Bishop came down from Alden to see him, Jeffrey watched him
as he had watched Ruth. He had never been very observant. He had never
had more than a boy's careless indifference and disregard of details
in his way of looking at men and things. But much thinking in the dark
had now given him intuitions that were now sharp and sensitive as
those of a woman. He was quick to know that the grip of the Bishop's
hand on his, the look of the Bishop's eye into his, were not those of
a man who had been obliged to fight against doubts in order to keep
his faith in him. That grip and that look were not those of a man who
wished to believe, who tried to believe, who told himself and was
obliged to keep on telling himself that he believed in spite of all.
No. Those were the grip and the look of a man who _knew_. The Bishop
_knew_.

It was even easier to understand the Bishop's silence than it had been
to see why Ruth might not