SECRETS There was a short silence.

Brice looked anxiously through the gathering darkness at the dimly seen face so near to his own.
He could not guess, for the life of him, whether the girl was silent because she refused to tell him what he sought so eagerly to know, or whether she was still fighting to control her voice.
As he sat gazing down at her, there was something so tiny, so fragile, so helplessly trustful about her, that it went straight to the man's heart.

He had played and schemed and risked life itself for this crucial hour, for this hour when he should have swept aside the girl's possible suspicions and enlisted her complete sympathy for himself and could make her trust him and feel keen remorse for the treatment he had received.
Yes--he had achieved all this.

And he had done infinitely more.

He had awakened in her heart a sense of loneliness and of need for some one in whom she might confide.
He had done all this, had Gavin Brice.