She paused and glanced around the room, smiling at the interest in our faces.
"You have at least one virtue—that of frankness," said the veiled lady. "Continue."
"It was not until evening that I found an opportunity to leave madame," Julie went on. "I hastened here; I rang the bell; but I confess I should have failed, I should not have secured an entrance, if it had not been that it was my husband who opened the door to me. Even after I was inside the door, he refused to permit me to see his master; but as we were debating together, M. Vantine himself came into the hall, and I ran to him and begged that he hear me. It was then that he invited me to enter this room."
She paused again, and a little shiver of expectancy ran through me.
At last we were to learn how Philip Vantine had met his death!
"I sat down," continued Julie. "I told him the story from the very beginning. He listened with much interest; but when I proposed that he should restore to me the letters, he hesitated. He walked up and down the room, trying to decide; then he took me through that door into the room beyond. The cabinet was standing in the centre of the floor, and all the lights were blazing.
"'Is that the cabinet?' he asked me, and when I said that most assuredly it was, he seemed surprised.
"'It is an easy thing to prove,' I said, and I went to the cabinet and pressed on the three springs, as I had seen madame do. The little handle at the side fell out, but suddenly he stopped me.
"'Yes, it is the cabinet,' he said. 'I see that. And no doubt the drawer contains the letters, as you say. But those letters do not belong to you. They belong to your mistress. I cannot permit that you take them away, for, after all, I do not know you. You may intend to make some bad use of them.'
"I protested that such a suspicion was most unjust, that my character was of the best, that I was devoted to my mistress and desired to protect her. He listened, but he was not convinced. In the end, he brought me back into this room. I could have cried with rage!
"'Return to your mistress,' he said, 'and inform her that I shall be most happy to return the letters to her. But it must be in her own hands that I place them. The letters are here, whenever it pleases her to claim them."