ee--unfortunately--Dal's
hardly in position to speak about the matter at all. I--"

He paused, as if seeking how to put it, and then spoke these
doubt-destroying words:

"It is very perplexing, but the truth is--he says so himself--he doesn't
know at all what took place."

"Oh!... _He doesn't know_!"

"I don't wonder you're astonished at his saying so," said the young man,
in quite a gentle way. "And yet I do believe him absolutely...."

He now explained, in well-selected phrases, that Jack Dalhousie had been
very drunk when he boarded the boat, having taken a running start on the
evening preceding. Though he might have seemed normal enough, through
long experience in control, he was actually quite irresponsible; and
drink had played strange tricks with his mind before now. The boy could
remember getting into the boat, it seemed; remember that--ah--that she
had objected (very properly) to his presence; remember standing up in
the boat, very angry, and the wind blowing in his face. The next thing
he remembered was being in the water, swimming away. And then, when he
landed, a man standing there on shore cursed him and struck him in the
face.... Then he had looked out over the water; he saw the upset
sailboat and the boatman rowing out, and the people, and it rushed over
him what he must have done. Till then, he said, he had never dreamed
that anything had happened. He could hardly believe it, even with the
evidence of his own eyes. Then later Hofheim, the sort of fellow, had
gone up to see him, and told him what people were saying, which so much
more than confirmed his worst suspicions. Hofheim was a stranger, but he
meant well....

Dalhousie, in short, was in the singular position of having to implore
others to assure him that he hadn't done all these terrible things. And
it appeared that Miss Carlisle Heth was the one person in the world who
could possibly give him that assurance.

So spoke the stranger. That he had scattered lifelines, that all his
oratory had come agrapple with nature's first law, evidently did not
cross his mind. He gazed down at the girl's dimly limned face, and his
gaze seemed full of an unconquerable hopefulness.

"The boy's behavior has been inexcusable in any case," he said. "And be
sure he's been punished, and will be punished severely. But ... it must
be that either the--the trouble didn't happen at all as this story says
it did, or if--at the worst--it did happen that way, Dalhousie