The Last Shot. Frederick Palmer
is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his attitude changed to one of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"
"Yes"
"Had you suspected me before that?"
"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him. There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he smiled as he had at the bumblebee.
"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.
"No, I don't think so."
He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a merry tattoo.
"You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland," he said with a charming bow, "and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a fair test. That little thunderer will not get me again. I'll fool the ones I want to fool. And I'm learning, Lanny, learning all the time—getting a little deafer all the time. Miss Galland," he added, struck in visible contrition by a new thought, "I am sorry"—he paused with head down for an instant—"very sorry to have deceived you."
"But you are still a deaf gardener to me," said Marta, finding consolation in pleasing him.
"Eh? eh?" He put his hand to his ear as he resumed his stoop. "Yes, yes," he added, as a deaf man will when understanding of a remark which he failed at first to catch comes to him in an echo. "Yes, the gardener has no past," he declared in the gentle old gardener's voice, "when all the flowers die every year and he thinks only of next year's blossoms—of the future!"
Now the air of the room seemed to be stifling him, that of the roofless world of the garden calling him. His face spoke pitifully a desire for escape as he withdrew. The bent figure disappeared around a turn in the path and they listened without moving until the sound of his slow, dragging footfalls had died away.
"When he is serving those of his own social station I can see how it would be easier for him not to have me know," said Marta. "Sensitive, proud, and intense—" and a look of horror appeared in her eyes. "As he came across the room his face was transformed. I imagine it was like that of a man giving no quarter in a bayonet charge!"
"His secret was at stake!" Lanstron said in ready championship.
She put up her hand as if to shut out a picture.
"Don't let us think of it!" she exclaimed with a shudder. "He did not know what he was doing. His is one of the natures that have moments when an impulse throws them off their balance and ruins the work of years. No, we must think only of his sacrifice, his enforced humiliation, in order to try to make amends for the past according to his light. No one could refuse him sympathy and respect."
Feller had won the day for himself where a friend's pleas might have failed. This was as it should be, Lanstron thought; and he smiled happily over the rare thing in Marta that felt the appeal which Feller had for him.
"The right view—the view that you were bound to take!" he said.
"And yet, I don't know your plans for him, Lanny. Pity is one thing; there is another thing to consider," she replied, with an abrupt change of tone. "But first let us leave Feller's quarters. We are intruders here."
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