Part 35 (2/2)

”I have little to add. I could not bring myself to give up the letter until I was sure it was really yours. Lest anyone else should see it, I hid it where no one could find it. But when I came down from my room again, Mr. Wallace told me you had been in and had gone back to Taloona.

So I kept it until I could be sure.”

”Sure of what?”

”Whether--you had had it.”

She laid it on the table in front of him.

”Take it,” she said. ”Do what you will with it. I am sorry you showed it to me. I would rather not have seen it. How it came where it was found I do not know. Until to-night I did not know it existed.”

She met his glance openly, frankly, proudly.

”And you believed it was mine!” she added.

”I had no alternative--until I saw you,” he answered.

”You have had that letter for weeks; I have been here three days. Yet you only come to me now--when I have asked you to come.”

”I dared not see you--lest----”

”Lest you discovered me to be even a greater traitress than you had already learned me to be,” she said in measured tones. ”I cannot blame you. The fault was mine. I have given you ample reason why your faith in me should have ended.”

”That is not true,” he exclaimed. ”I could not bring myself to believe you had acted so. But it was horrible enough as it was. It was because I had not lost faith in you that I hid the letter so as to prevent anyone else seeing it. By doing so I was not acting as I should have acted towards the Bank.”

”I never had it, never. I wish I had not seen it, for it”--her voice lost its hardness as she spoke--”it is the last straw. Whatever else I knew my husband to be, I held him innocent of that crime. When you and all the others suspected him, I would not, could not bring myself to believe it. But now----”

Her voice caught and she turned aside, sinking into a chair where she sat with averted face and bowed head.

”No wonder you did not wish to see me again,” she added presently, as he did not speak. ”What am I now? The wife of a thief, an outlaw, one who was almost a murderer. Oh, leave me! I should not have sent to you.

Leave me. There is nothing for me now but death or degradation.”

”You must not say that, Jess, you must not say that,” he said in a strained voice as he came and stood beside her. ”Whatever he may have done, you are not affected by it. Appearances cannot well be blacker against him than they are at present, but you must still remember you are not responsible for his ill-deeds. No one here, least of all myself, blames you. Besides, he has not yet been convicted.”

”Not after that letter? There can be no doubt after that. He must have had it with him when he was at Taloona, and dropped it.”

”But it was opened, torn open, when the trooper found it. If Eustace had dropped it, surely it would have been sealed up.”

She glanced at him quickly.

”Do you still suspect me?” she exclaimed.

”I should not be here if I did,” he answered quietly.

”Oh, I don't know what to think,” she said. ”I would rather you had come to tell me he was dead than to show me that hideous thing. Better if he were dead, far, far better, than that he should live to end his days on the gallows or in gaol.”

She was voicing his own thought, a thought which had been with him for many days.

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