feeling was discernible in her. She spoke without
looking at me. Her hands were fast clasped
in her lap, and her eyes were fixed on the
ground.

"I ought to have done you the common
justice to explain myself," she said, repeating
my own words. "You shall see whether I did
try to do you justice, or not. I told you just now
that I never slept, and never returned to my bed,
after you had left my sitting-room. It's useless
to trouble you by dwelling on what I thought—
you wouldn't understand my thoughts—I will
only tell you what I did, when time enough had
passed to help me to recover myself. I refrained
from alarming the house, and telling everybody
what had happened—as I ought to have done.
In spite of what I had seen, I was fond enough
of you to believe—no matter what!—any
impossibility, rather than admit it to my own mind
that you were deliberately a thief. I thought
and thought—and I ended in writing to you."

"I never received the letter."

"I know you never received it. Wait a
little, and you shall hear why. My letter would
have told you nothing openly. It would not
have ruined you for life, if it had fallen into
some other person's hands. It would only have
said—in a manner which you yourself could not
possibly have mistaken—that I had reason to
know you were in debt, and that it was in my
experience and in my mother's experience of
you, that you were not very discreet, or very
scrupulous about how you got money when you
wanted it. You would have remembered the
visit of the French lawyer, and you would have
known what I referred to. If you had read on
with some interest after that, you would have
come to an offer I had to make to you—the offer,
privately (not a word, mind, to be said openly
about it between us!), of the loan of as large a
sum of money as I could get.—And I would have
got it!" she exclaimed, her colour beginning to
rise again, and her eyes looking up at me once
more. "I would have pledged the Diamond
myself, if I could have got the money in no
other way! In those words, I wrote to you.
Wait! I did more than that. I arranged with
Penelope to give you the letter when nobody
was near. I planned to shut myself into my
bedroom, and to have the sitting-room left
open and empty all the morning. And I hoped
—with all my heart and soul I hoped!—that
you would take the opportunity, and put the
Diamond back secretly in the drawer."

I attempted to speak. She lifted her hand
impatiently, and stopped me. In the rapid
alternations of her temper, her anger was
beginning to rise again. She got up from her
chair, and approached me.

"I know what you are going to say," she
went on. "You are going to remind me again
that you never received my letter. I can tell
you why. I tore it up."

"For what reason?" I asked.

"For the best of reasons. I preferred tearing
it up to throwing it away upon such a man
as you! What was the first news that reached
me in the morning? Just as my little plan
was complete, what did I hear? I heard that
you—you!!!—were the foremost person in the
house in fetching the police. You were the
active man; you were the leader; you were
working harder than any of them to recover
the jewel! You even carried your audacity far
enough to ask to speak to me about the loss of
the Diamond—the Diamond which you yourself
had stolen; the Diamond which was all the time
in your own hands! After that proof of your
horrible falseness and cunning, I tore up my
letter. But even then—even when I was
maddened by the searching and questioning of the
policeman, whom you had sent in—even then,
there was some infatuation in my mind which
wouldn't let me give you up. I said to myself,
'He has played his vile farce before everybody
else in the house. Let me try if he can play it
before Me.' Somebody told me you were on
the terrace. I went down to the terrace. I
forced myself to look at you; I forced myself
to speak to you. Have you forgotten what I
said?"

I might have answered that I remembered
every word of it. But what purpose, at that
moment, would the answer have served?

How could I tell her that what she had
said had astonished me, had distressed me,
had suggested to me that she was in a state
of dangerous nervous excitement, had even
roused a moment's doubt in my mind whether
the loss of the jewel was as much a mystery to
her as to the rest of us—but had never once
given me so much as a glimpse at the truth?
Without the shadow of a proof to produce in
vindication of my innocence, how could I
persuade her that I knew no more than the veriest
stranger could have known of what was really
in her thoughts when she spoke to me on the
terrace?

"It may suit your convenience to forget; it
suits my convenience to remember," she went
on. "I know what I said—for I considered it
with myself, before I said it. I gave you one
opportunity after another of owning the truth.
I left nothing unsaid that I could say—short of
actually telling you that I knew you had
committed the theft. And all the return you made,
was to look at me with your vile pretence of
astonishment, and your false face of innocence—
just as you have looked at me to-day; just as you
are looking at me now! I left you, that morning,
knowing you at last for what you were—for
what you are—as base a wretch as ever walked
the earth!"

"If you had spoken out at the time, you
might have left me, Rachel, knowing that you
had cruelly wronged an innocent man."

"If I had spoken out before other people,"
she retorted, with another burst of indignation,
"you would have been disgraced for life! If
I had spoken out to no ears but your's, you
would have denied it, as you are denying it now!
Do you think I should have believed you?
Would a man hesitate at a lie, who had done
what I saw you do—who had behaved about it