“She had taken this daring means to free herself from your authority, or the legal control you might have exercised over her?” said Paul Desfrayne. “Had she, think you, destroyed the book?”
He made the inquiry with a flutter at his heart.
“I suppose so,” answered Gilardoni. “It is impossible she would have had the folly to preserve it. The probability—the certainty is, that she burned it.”
“What infamy—what wickedness!” cried Paul Desfrayne.
Gilardoni shrugged his shoulders.
“Her insatiate ambition, her craving for wealth, station, luxury, overmastered all other feelings,” he said.
“Then she was free to defy you and all the world?”
“Quite so.”
“What did you do on making this extraordinary discovery?”
“What could I do? No inquiries could enable me to glean the slightest clue to the place whither her brother, the priest, had gone. I sought in every direction my limited resources admitted of for information as to his whereabouts, but, beyond the fact that he had gone to America, could learn nothing.”