The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

There could be only one answer to the riddle, if Kane's suggestion that / Mr. Brandreth had returned the manuscript without showing it to any one / were rejected. The publisher could speak of no one besides Kane as a / friend except Miss Hughes, and it was clearly she who had refused to / look again at Ray's book. She had played a double part with him; she had / let him make a fool of himself; she had suffered him to keep coming to / her, and reading his things to her, and making her his literary / confidante. He ground his teeth with shame to think how he had sought / her advice and exulted in her praise; but the question was not merely, / it was not primarily, a question of truth or untruth, kindness or / unkindness toward himself, but of justice toward Kane. He had told her / of the resentment he had felt toward Kane; he had left her to the belief / that he still suspected Kane of what she had done. If she were willing / that he should remain in this suspicion, it was worse than anything he / now accused her of.

He kept away from Chapley's all day, because of the embarrassment of / seeing her with that in his mind. He decided that he must never see her / again till she showed some wish to be relieved from the false position / she had suffered herself to be placed in. At the end of the afternoon / there came a knock at his door, and he set the door open and confronted / Mr. Brandreth, who stood smiling at the joke of his being there, with / his lustrous silk hat and gloves and light overcoat on. Ray passed some / young banter with him in humorous recognition of the situation, before / they came to business, as Mr. Brandreth called it.

"Look here! " said the publisher, with a quizzical glance at him from / Ray's easy-chair, while Ray himself lounged on the edge of his bed. "Did / you think I wanted to show your novel to old Kane, that time when I sent / back for it?"

"Yes," said Ray; and he could not say any more for his prescience of / what was coming.

"Well, I didn't," Mr. Brandreth returned. "And if I'd ever thought you / suspected him, I should have told you so long ago. The person that I did / want it for is anxious you should know it wasn't Kane, and I thought I'd / better come and tell you so by word of mouth; I rather made a mess of it / before, in writing. If you've any feeling about the matter, it's only / fair to Kane to assure you that he wasn't at all the person."

"Kane told me so himself to-day," said Ray; "and all the grudge I felt / was gone long ago."

"Well, of course! It's a matter of business. " In turning it off in this / common-sense way Mr. Brandreth added lightly, "I'm authorized to tell / you who it really was, if you care to know."

Ray shook his head. "I don't care to know. What's the use?"

"There isn't any. I'm glad you take it the way you do, and it will be a / great relief to -- the real one."

"It's all right."

Ray had been strengthening his defences against any confidential / approach from the moment Mr. Brandreth began to speak; he could not help / it. Now they began to talk of other things. At the end the publisher / returned to the book with a kind of desperate sigh: "You haven't done / anything with your story yet, I suppose?"

"No," said Ray.

Mr. Brandreth, after a moment's hesitation, went away without saying / anything more. Even that tentative inquiry about the fate of his book / could not swerve Ray now from his search for the motives which had / governed Peace in causing this message to be sent him. It could only be / that she had acted in Kane's behalf, who had a right to justice from / her, and she did not care what Ray thought of her way of doing justice. / In the complex perversity of his mood the affair was so humiliating to / him, as it stood, that he could not rest in it. That evening he went / determined to make an opportunity to speak with her alone, if none / offered.

It was she who let him in, and then she stood looking at him in a kind / of daze, which he might well have taken for trepidation. It did not give / him courage, and he could think of no better way to begin than to say, / "I have come to thank you, Miss Hughes, for your consideration for Mr. / Kane. I couldn't have expected less of you, when you found out that I / had been suspecting him of that friendly refusal to look at my / manuscript the second time."

His hard tone, tense with suppressed anger, had all the effect he could / have wished. He could see her wince, and she said, confusedly, "I told / Mr. Brandreth, and he said he would tell you it wasn't Mr. Kane."

"Yes," said Ray, stiffly, "he came to tell me."

She hesitated, and then she asked, "Did he tell you who it was?"

"No. But I knew."

If she meant him to say something more, he would not; he left to her the / strain and burden that in another mood he would have shared so / willingly, or wholly assumed.

At a little noise she started, and looked about, and then, as if / returning to him by a painful compliance with his will, she said, "When / he told me what he had done to get the manuscript back, I couldn't let / him give it to me."