“They’re burnt, they’re burnt!” shrieked Elsie. “He swore he’d burn them!”
“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them, again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘He’s ill now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury, Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to listen to me?”
Elsie was sobbing and writhing.
“Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless voice of the solicitor.
“No.”
“What have you done with them?”
“I burnt them all.”
He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.”
“I was afraid to keep them.”
“For fear of your husband seeing them?”