Lockwood must have recognized it. He had made a mistake. It was no
sufficient answer to anything that he had done to assert that some
one else had also done something.
"Inez," he said, and we could almost hear his feet as he moved
over the floor in her direction in a last desperate appeal, "can't
you trust me, when I tell you that everything is all right, that
they are trying to ruin me--with you?"
There was a silence, during which we could almost hear her quick
breath come and go.
"Women--not even Peruvian women are like the women of the past,
Chester," she said at length. "We are not playthings. Perhaps we
have hearts--but we also have heads. We are not to be taken up and
put down as you please. We may love--but we also think. Chester, I
have been to see Professor Kennedy, and--"
She stopped. It hurt too much to repeat what she had seen.
"Inez," he implored.
There was evidently a great struggle of love and suspicion going
on in her, her love of him, her memory of her father, the
recollection of what she had heard and seen. No one could have
been as we were without wishing to help her. Yet no one could help
her. She must work out her own life herself.
"Yes," she said finally, the struggle ended.
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