But the major was quick on his feet and was already between him and that lady. This act forced from Mr. Jeffrey’s lips the following broken sentence:
“I should—like—you—to—tell—me.” Great gasps came with each heavily spoken word.
“Perhaps this morsel of lace will do it in a gentler manner than I could,” responded the district attorney, opening his hand, in which lay the scrap of lace that, an hour or so before, I had plucked away from the boarding of that fatal closet.
Mr. Jeffrey eyed it and understood. His hands went up to his face and he swayed to the point of falling. Miss Tuttle came quickly forward.
“Oh!” she moaned, as her eyes fell on the little white shred. “The providence of God has found us out. We have suffered, labored and denied in vain.”
“Yes,” came in dreary echo from the man none of us had understood till now; “so great a crime could not be hid. God will have vengeance. What are we that we should hope to avert it by any act or at any cost?”
The major, with his eyes fixed piercingly on this miserable man, replied with one pregnant sentence:
“Then you forced your wife to suicide?”
“No,” he began; but before another word could follow, Miss Tuttle, resplendent in beauty and beaming with new life, broke in with the fervid cry:
“You wrong him and you wrong her by such a suggestion. It was not her husband but her conscience that forced her to this retributive act. What Mr. Jeffrey might have done had she proved obdurate and blind to the enormity of her own guilt, I do not know. But that he is innocent of so influencing her is proved by the shock he suffered at finding she had taken her punishment into her own hands.”